Field crews
Account for safety, mobile devices, dispatch, weather, duty status, and employees who cannot engage during active work.
For Energy and Utilities
Phishing Simulation Planning for Energy and Utility Employees
Energy and utility organizations connect field crews, control centers, engineering, customer service, billing, suppliers, contractors, and corporate teams across essential services.
A workforce simulation must remain completely separate from operational technology, outage management, emergency communications, field safety, and customer-service continuity.
Industry-specific scenarios • Safe campaign boundaries • Reporting practice • Contextual measurement
01Understand the work
Design around how energy and utility organizations actually operate
Start with the people, systems, authority, and verification routes involved in one real workflow. The exercise should practice an action employees can take without disrupting customers, operations, safety, or real incident response.
Control and operations
Do not imitate alarms, outages, switching, dispatch, maintenance, or emergency instructions.
Customer service and billing
Use invented customers and accounts without resembling a disconnection, hardship, outage, or payment emergency.
Engineering and vendors
Practice document and support verification outside operational, design, maintenance, and remote-access systems.
02Choose the scenario
Use a recognizable request with a safe response
Give the scenario one learning objective and one explainable next step. Use fictional people, organizations, records, transactions, and incidents, and avoid exploiting a live problem or sensitive relationship.
Vendor document
Practice validating an invented supplier, business context, file owner, and destination.
Workforce account notice
Ask employees to reach the authentic identity or HR service independently.
Training invitation
Reinforce opening the known learning service rather than an unfamiliar sign-in page.
Supplier payment update
Practice the approved callback and authorization process with fictional details.
03Plan responsibly
Resolve operational questions before launch
| Consideration | Question to answer | Required preparation |
|---|---|---|
| OT separation | Could any campaign action touch control, outage, field, engineering, remote-access, or operational systems? | Use isolated training infrastructure with no operational credentials, integrations, files, or destinations. |
| Safety and reliability | Could the message be mistaken for an alarm, outage, dispatch, switching, maintenance, or emergency instruction? | Exclude these themes and obtain operational review and stop authority. |
| Duty status | Can field and shift employees participate without affecting safety or essential service? | Use approved stationary windows and provide reporting suited to representative devices. |
| Current conditions | Is there an outage, severe weather event, emergency, cyber incident, or constrained operation? | Check immediately before launch and postpone or stop when conditions change. |
04Run the exercise
Move from an approved brief to useful follow-up
- 1
Define one behavior
State the request being tested, expected verification or reporting action, authorized audience, permitted data, and intended use of the findings.
- 2
Confirm the real process
Make sure employees can reach the authentic service, contact, approver, reporting tool, or escalation route before testing the behavior.
- 3
Pilot end to end
Test representative accounts, locations, shifts, devices, email controls, landing pages, event records, reports, stop conditions, and follow-up.
- 4
Brief response teams
Prepare security, IT, operations, communications, managers, and relevant providers while preserving normal handling of unrelated real reports.
- 5
Debrief and improve
Explain the expected action, provide relevant private learning, and assign every process or control improvement to an accountable owner.
Source: NIST: Building a Cybersecurity and Privacy Learning Program
05Measure responsibly
Interpret campaign activity in business context
Record intended recipients, exclusions, successful deliveries, unique recipient events, verified reports, response handling, and completed follow-up. Reconcile automated inspection and repeated events before attributing activity to employees.
Interpret results with operational or corporate role, shift, duty status, device, location, delivery, system conditions, and reporting access. A workforce simulation does not measure OT security or service resilience.
Use findings to improve real reporting, verification, identity, access, email, vendor, and support processes. A single interaction does not explain why a decision occurred and should not become an employee risk score.
Common questions
Common questions about Phishmake's features, onboarding, and support, answered to help you get started with confidence.
Should phishing simulations involve operational technology?
No. Keep workforce simulations in approved email and training environments. Any technical OT exercise needs its own specialist scope, authorization, risk assessment, and safeguards.
Can a campaign mention an outage?
Avoid outage, emergency, switching, restoration, safety, and service-disconnection themes that could trigger operational or customer action.
Can field crews participate?
Only when participation is relevant, authorized, and safely separated from driving and operational duties, with a usable reporting route on supported devices.
Does awareness training secure a utility?
No. It supports a broader program but does not replace identity, email, endpoint, network, OT, backup, access, incident-response, safety, and recovery controls.
Sources & further reading
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