Email Campaigns
Last updated
Last updated
In this article, we explain the process of creating and initiating Email Campaigns. With these campaigns, companies can distribute phishing emails to their employees in order to evaluate whether they pose any potential risk to the organisation.
1. To create a new Email Campaign, click on the New Campaign button.
2. Enter a Campaign Name:
3. Even though it is optional, we suggest that during the campaigns you add a “clickers” group. This is essentially where all the clickers (any user that clicks on any links included in the phishing campaign) will be stored. Thus, it is preferred to use an empty group so you can distinguish the high-risk employees.
To learn more about groups, click on the following link for the corresponding article.
4. You can also enter a Description:
5. For demonstration purposes, we entered the details and selected an empty group called Recipients.
6. Let’s click on NEXT STEP to proceed to the Templates phase:
Alternatively, we can navigate to the next step(s) by directly selecting them.
7. Press the Select template button to choose the email template you want to use. This is what the target user actually sees when she/he receives the email campaign.
8. In this instance, we don’t have any custom templates, but we can use any of the system templates:
9. Scroll at the bottom and select different pages to list other templates:
10. You can always filter the templates from the search box or through the filtering options in the menu:
11. Let’s use the Booking template:
12. Click OK to confirm your choice or Cancel to negate the process.
13. After the confirmation, we get the following preview:
You can alternatively create and use custom email templates. For further guidance regarding email templates click on this link.
14. To select a landing page, click on the Select page button:
15. As always, you can select a custom template but, in our case, we will select one from the system templates:
16. Let’s use the matching landing page of the email template for Booking:
17. Click on the indicated option to open the landing page in a new tab on the browser.
This will display how the user actually sees the corresponding page:
18. To disable the landing page, just click on the following button:
19. Furthermore, you have the option to use an attachment payload. To do this, just click on the indicated box:
20. Click on Add to view the available options:
21. You can also set a custom name for that file, so it appears as a normal document they would expect:
22. For this example, let us use both a landing page and an attachment:
23. You can click on the trash can symbol to remove the file:
24. Moreover, you can tick the following box in order to redirect the target user. If the target accesses the attached document which contains the macros, they will be redirected to the specified landing page for that campaign:
25. When you finish the process, scroll to the bottom of the page, and click on NEXT STEP to proceed or PREVIOUS to go back to the previous step.
26. Proceed to the next step called Recipients:
27. Select the target group for the campaign.
28. You may selectively add or remove specific users from the campaign just by ticking or unticking the boxes found beside their records:
For this example, we will leave everything as it is and will proceed to the Schedule step:
29. From the following option, we can select the Launch Date for the campaign. In other words, the starting time initiating the phishing email distribution.
30. Furthermore, we can set the through date for the phishing campaign. No further emails will be sent afterwards.
The platform calculates the number of emails to be distributed in relation to the campaign interval frame and sends the phishing emails accordingly.
31. Select a Timezone for the campaign and proceed to the final step.
32. Click on the indicated button to view the landing page instead:
33. Once again, click on the following button to view the landing page on your browser:
34. Scroll down and select the URL for your landing page. Different domains are available:
35. In this instance, we’ve chosen the https://bookiing.online domain and the default SMTP sending profile:
If you would like to use a Default Profile for the SMTP sending profile, you will then have to whitelist the corresponding hostname and IP address.
36. Alternatively, you may select a Custom SMTP Profile:
For further details on custom SMTP profiles, navigate to the SMTP Profiles Guide article.
37. We will choose a Default Profile and will enter a spoofed Email Address and Name as a sender (as long as the domain is registered and valid).
38. Before launching the campaign, we can test whether the emails can reach the target inbox. To do that, click on the Send Test Email button:
39. Fill the details required and click on Send.
40. Finally, select the LAUNCH button to start the email campaign.
41. Click on Launch to confirm your actions:
42. On the confirmation prompt that pops up, click OK.
43. To view more than 10 entries in a single page, just click on the drop-down list:
44. Email has been sent as expected:
45. Click on the arrow prior to the user’s first name to view more details:
46. You can reload the results in real time using the Refresh button:
47. When we refresh the page, we see that the user has opened our phishing email:
48. Furthermore, there is a timeline of the campaign at the bottom of the page:
49. We also have the ability to export a report signifying the campaign’s current status in an excel format file. Click on the Report button:
50. You can generate either a Results or a Raw Events file:
51. Click on them in order to download:
52. Let’s open the Results file to see how it looks like:
53. On the other hand, the Raw Events is structured as follows:
54. The target has eventually clicked on a link from the campaign:
55. As a result, the platform managed to retrieve some information (version) in regard to the target’s system and browser:
56. Our target has also submitted some data:
57. If the landing page of the campaign has capturing passwords enabled, we will be able to view the details. We just have to click on the View Details button:
58. Moreover, if passwords were indeed captured, we could also choose to Replay Credentials:
59. A window will then pop up, prompting you to enter any site you want. The platform will then proceed to submit the captured data in order to check whether the credentials of that user can be used for unauthorised access.
60. If you have entered a link, click on OK to proceed or Cancel to negate the process.
61. At the end, the user has also opened the attachment:
62. Click on View Details to view the details that were retrieved:
63. Select the Go Back button to return to the Email Campaigns default page:
64. To view the results of a campaign just click on the statistics button:
65. You can always pause the campaign by clicking on the Pause Campaign button:
66. On the prompt that pops up, select Pause Campaign or Cancel accordingly:
67. On the next prompt, press OK:
68. You can resume the campaign by clicking on the Resume Campaign button:
69. Click on Resume Campaign to proceed:
70. Once again, select OK to finalise:
71. We could now demonstrate the deletion of the campaign, but since we can show this later on, let’s go ahead and click on Complete Campaign to end our campaign:
72. As usual, select Complete Campaign to end the process:
73. Click OK to proceed.
74. As we can see, our campaign is no longer part of the Active Campaigns, so let’s go over to the Archived Campaigns:
75. Finally, click on the trash can button to delete the campaign:
76. Confirm your action using Delete.
77. Click OK to end the process:
78. Otherwise, you may delete a campaign from within. You may do that through the trash can button:
