Should the awareness plan consider the differences between the teams?

Enterprise attacks have evolved, so attackers are not targeting the entire company, but rather specific departments with increasingly compelling messages.

This movement is no coincidence, because understanding the routine, language, and responsibilities of each area has made scams more difficult to detect and significantly expanded the potential impact within organizations.

As a result, in recent years, phishing, social engineering, and digital fraud scams have started to exploit publicly available internal information or obtained through leaks and social networks.

In this way, attackers are able to create communications that seem legitimate to each department, such as payment approvals, selection processes, or contract requests.

This scenario increases corporate risk because it reveals a critical point, after all, while attacks become increasingly specific, many defense strategies are still generic.

Therefore, without segmented training and specific simulations, teams cannot develop practical reflexes to recognize fraud in line with their routine. The result is a larger attack surface and devastating consequences.

Why is it important to consider the differences between teams?

Phishing and social engineering simulations have always been used to assess the level of preparedness of teams, but the current scenario has made evident an important limitation, because generic attacks no longer represent reality.

Today, cybercriminals study internal processes, exploit public information, and personalize messages to look like legitimate routines in each area.

In this way, when a simulation does not keep up with this level of sophistication, it fails to measure the real risk and starts to offer a false sense of security.

Thus, while generic simulations only evaluate basic behavior, targeted ones are able to reproduce the day-to-day challenges of each department and thus prepare people for attacks.

After all, each professional has their specific digital security challenges and breaches, a financial analyst, for example, is pressured by urgent payment requests. An HR professional, on the other hand, deals with resume attachments.

And criminals know exactly how to use triggers to press each area, so each context requires attention to different triggers, and generic attacks simply ignore these nuances.

This means that teams can do well in a simulation, but still be vulnerable to moves designed exactly for their routines.

That's why targeted simulations are so important, because they:

• They follow the evolution of real attacks;

• They reproduce scenarios that make sense for each department;

• They use plausible situations;

• They use familiar language and pressures typical of the area.

  
  

Thus, this personalization drastically increases the learning capacity, because it connects the risk directly to the employee's experience.

When the person recognizes the context and realizes that he could fall into a similar fraud during work, awareness ceases to be abstract and becomes practical and immediate.

Therefore, investing in targeted simulations is not just a technical evolution, it is an essential component of security maturity, as they reveal invisible vulnerabilities, strengthen behavioral reflexes, and prepare teams.

With this, instead of training everyone in the same way, organizations start to train each team according to the risks it faces.

The result is simple, more prepared employees, safer decisions, and a significant reduction in the attack surface.

Which departments are most targeted by criminals?

Among the departments most targeted by cybercriminals, finance is at the top of the list. This is because it is the area that deals directly with payments, approvals, and flows of funds.

After all, its elements are extremely attractive for transfer scams or fake boletos, which is why attackers usually:

• Explore emergency situations;

• Simulate supplier charges;

• Imitate leaders to pressure quick decisions.

When the criminal understands how the company's financial process works, he can create highly convincing messages that are difficult to identify.

 HR is also a recurring target, especially because it deals with a large volume of personal data and sensitive documents. Scams involving resumes, requests for registration updates or false vacancies are common.

The procurement team, on the other hand, is often approached with fake commercial proposals, links to infected catalogs, or files that appear to be quotes and contracts.

As this area usually interacts with several suppliers, it is easier for the attacker to impersonate a contact and mislead the employee.

Finally, the IT team, despite being more trained, receives sophisticated threats that simulate support tickets, system alerts, and urgent updates.

In all cases, what makes these departments vulnerable is the combination of intense routine, high amounts of external interactions, and processes that depend on trust, exactly what criminals know how to exploit.

What are the benefits for the team and for the entire organization?

The benefits of targeted simulations extend to both each team and the entire organization, because they connect learning to the operational reality of each area and strengthen overall security maturity.

For departments, they reveal specific vulnerabilities, develop faster reflexes in the face of routine-aligned fraud, and generate actionable insights that allow them to fine-tune processes.

And the result is a more prepared, resilient, and less susceptible to incidents, here are some of these benefits and why they are essential for organizations.

Increased maturity

It is necessary to understand that security maturity evolves when teams stop just recognizing basic risks and start understanding how scams really present themselves in their daily lives.

In this way, targeted simulations make each department experience scenarios that reflect their responsibilities, pressures, and workflows.

This strengthens decision-making, expands the ability to identify suspicious patterns, and creates faster and more assertive reflexes in the face of real situations. This maturation also improves the preventive posture.

Thus, employees adopt good practices even before an incident occurs and when they understand their points of attention, they begin to adjust routines, review critical steps, and report abnormal behaviors with more autonomy.

Risk reduction

With segmented simulations, organizations are able to mitigate risks, because from these actions it is possible to map real vulnerabilities. Thus, leadership begins to work with data and not just with assumptions.

In this way, each department is tested in specific scenarios, revealing weaknesses that a generic simulation would never show, allowing the identification of risk behaviors and fragile processes.

Risk reduction is also amplified when these findings are transformed into practical actions, when leaders are able to adjust flows and reinforce internal controls in a more strategic way.

Evolution of safe behavior

Targeted simulations help employees internalize safety behaviors because they work with situations they actually experience.

Thus, by recognizing a fraud that could have arrived in a daily email, the employee starts to adopt a more critical and careful posture.

This learning reduces the automatic impulse to click and improves the ability to identify inconsistencies.

Over time, this safe behavior spreads through routine, influencing decisions, internal communications, and even interaction with suppliers.

Therefore, the organizational culture becomes more conscious, collaborative, and prepared to act preventively. This kind of continuous evolution is what differentiates companies with high digital resilience from those that remain vulnerable.

What role does PhishX play in targeted simulations

PhishX plays a central role in the entire awareness cycle, starting with the strategic planning of simulations and campaigns.

The platform helps security leaders identify which areas have the most exposure, which internal processes are most sensitive, and which types of scams are most likely to succeed.

With this initial intelligence, it is possible to build a structured plan, aligned with the company's maturity level and the real vulnerabilities of each department, ensuring that each action has purpose and measurable impact.

In execution, PhishX offers resources that allow you to create, customize and distribute highly realistic simulations, respecting the context and routine of each team.

The platform provides specific models, adjustable to the organization's internal flows, allowing Finance, HR, Legal, IT, and other areas to receive scenarios that represent their own challenges.

In addition, automation makes it easier to schedule, segment, and recur campaigns, keeping the strategy active without burdening security teams.

Finally, PhishX empowers continuous evolution by providing detailed reports, comparative dashboards, and actionable insights that help leaders understand behaviors, identify trends, and quickly adjust strategy.

The data allows you to analyze performance by area, detect critical points and measure the evolution of security maturity over time.

Thus, the platform not only runs simulations, but supports a continuous journey of improvement, turning awareness into concrete results for the entire organization. Want to know more? Contact our experts.

It is essential that the awareness plan takes into account the differences between the teams.