Mock review exercise: AI for Organisational Email Security

Project summary

PhiShield is an AI-supported cybersecurity system designed to reduce phishing and business-email compromise in large organisations. It combines email metadata, click behaviour in simulated phishing exercises, training-test performance, and workplace communication patterns to generate a phishing susceptibility score for employees.

It also produces behavioural labels such as “authority responsive”, “urgency reactive”, or “procedurally compliant”. The applicant states that the system is intended as a decision-support tool for security awareness and risk mitigation, not as an autonomous decision-maker.

Technical design

The model is trained on historical enterprise email events from three multinational firms. It uses features such as response patterns, deviation from workflow, phishing-test behaviour, escalation habits, and linguistic markers in replies.

The system produces a risk score from 0 to 100 and a short natural-language explanation based on contributing features. Confidence scores are logged internally but are not shown to affected employees. PhiShield states that protected attributes are not used directly, but job role, seniority, language, and reporting structure may influence the model.

Pilot incident

At NorthBridge, a new department manager excluded a senior executive assistant with twenty years of service from the Executive Committee after the system flagged her for authority bias. The manager explained that people who strongly follow leadership instructions were considered more likely to comply with a spoofed executive request.

The employee had not been informed in advance that behavioural security scores could affect committee membership, received only a brief managerial explanation, and was given no appeal route. They interpreted the incident as a stigmatizing judgment that mispresented loyalty and procedural discipline as a defect.

When reporting pilot results back to PhiShield, NorthBridge security department included the following statement:

“Business email compromise and targeted phishing cost our industry billions annually, and the tactics are evolving faster than our brains can keep up with. Information security is an entirely new risk that cannot be adequately understood by senior staff trained decades ago in a different environment. This software is working exactly as intended. In just the pilot phase, we’ve seen a 19% reduction in successful phishing-test clicks.”

Dashboard example