Why Your Annual Phishing Test Is a Participation Trophy

Ah, the annual phishing test. That magical day when your security team pretends to be hackers, your employees pretend to know better, and leadership pretends that clicking rates somehow equal security maturity.

The Participation Trophy of Cybersecurity

Let’s break it down.

Once a year:

  1. You send out a phishing email with slightly better grammar than Nigerian princes.
  2. Bob from Accounting clicks it within 4 seconds because there was a Starbucks gift card promised.
  3. You send out a mandatory training video that everyone opens in a background tab while finishing Wordle.
  4. You report a “20% improvement from last year!” to leadership, who then move on to budget planning for the next acquisition.

👏 Congrats. Everyone gets a gold star.

Why Annual Phishing Tests Are Useless

Here’s the problem:

  • Phishing isn’t annual. Attackers don’t check your compliance calendar before launching a campaign.
  • Testing once a year teaches people one thing: to be suspicious for one week out of 52.
  • Metrics are misleading. A lower click rate might mean employees are alert – or it might mean they’re ignoring emails entirely to avoid tests.

What You Should Be Doing Instead

If you actually want to improve resilience:

  1. Conduct frequent, varied phishing tests. Monthly at minimum. Mix payloads, themes, and difficulty levels.
  2. Include positive reinforcement. Reward users who report phish quickly rather than just shaming those who fail.
  3. Simulate real attacker behavior. Use payloads that reflect current threats instead of generic “password expiry” lures from 2015.
  4. Train on remediation, not just avoidance. Clicking happens. What matters is how fast it gets reported so damage can be contained.

Final Thoughts

Your annual phishing test is about as effective as an annual gym membership. It feels good to sign up. It ticks a box. But it does nothing if you don’t use it regularly.

Security awareness is a culture, not a compliance event.

So keep your participation trophy if you want. Just don’t expect it to stop the next ransomware incident.

But hey, at least everyone got their phishing training certificate for the year.