🔰 Practical Phishing Full Course 🔰

1️⃣ Introduction to Phishing

• What is phishing?
• History & evolution of phishing attacks
• Common phishing goals: stealing credentials, installing malware, financial fraud
• Types of phishing:
• Email phishing
• Spear phishing (targeted attacks)
• Whaling (targeting executives)
• SMS/SMiShing
• Vishing (voice phishing)
• Clone phishing

Practical Exercise: Analyze real-world phishing email examples safely in a lab environment.

2️⃣ How Phishing Works

• Understanding social engineering
• How attackers craft phishing emails/websites
• Techniques to bypass spam filters and human vigilance
• Identifying phishing indicators:
• Suspicious sender email
• Generic greetings
• Misspellings / grammatical errors
• Urgent or threatening language
• Fake links & attachments

Practical Exercise: Examine email headers & identify phishing patterns.

3️⃣ Setting Up a Safe Lab

• Tools needed:
• Virtual machines (VMware / VirtualBox)
• Kali Linux (for penetration testing tools)
• Burp Suite (proxy for analyzing web traffic)
• Email testing environment (Mailtrap / Fake SMTP)
• Isolated network to avoid accidental harm

Practical Exercise: Create your lab with VM and test phishing emails safely.

4️⃣ Phishing Tools & Techniques

Email Phishing:

• SET (Social Engineering Toolkit)
• Gophish (open-source phishing simulator)
• Creating realistic phishing templates

Website Phishing:

• Cloning login pages
• URL shorteners & masking
• Hosting fake pages in lab

Practical Exercise:

• Launch a test phishing campaign in Gophish to simulate attacks
• Analyze clicks, opened emails, and credentials (dummy only!)

5️⃣ Advanced Phishing Techniques

• Spear phishing: Targeted email crafting
• Whaling: High-value targets
• Baiting & pretexting
• Credential harvesting with phishing pages

Practical Exercise: Create personalized spear-phishing email (simulation only).

6️⃣ Detecting & Mitigating Phishing

• How to recognize phishing in real life
• Email security tools (Spam filters, DKIM, SPF, DMARC)
• Web security tools (URL scanners, anti-phishing browser extensions)
• Security awareness training for employees

Practical Exercise:

• Test phishing emails on lab environment to check detection
• Practice reporting phishing attempts safely

7️⃣ Post-Attack Analysis

• Forensics: tracing phishing emails
• Reading headers to find origin IP
• Incident response procedures

Practical Exercise:

• Simulate an incident and respond as a cybersecurity analyst

8️⃣ Certifications & Learning Paths

• Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) – Hands-on phishing techniques
• CompTIA Security+ – Awareness & prevention
• Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP) – Advanced penetration testing

💡 Bonus: Ethical & Legal Guidelines

• Always test in controlled lab
• Never use real emails or data
• Use phishing simulations only for training
• Avoid illegal phishing or targeting real users