Doppel has introduced a new product called Doppel Simulation, which expands its platform for defending against social engineering. The tool uses autonomous AI agents to create multi-channel simulations that mirror how attackers operate across email, SMS, messaging apps, and soon voice. The goal is to move beyond legacy phishing tests that rely on email click rates and instead measure resilience across a broader set of real-world attack paths.
For CISOs, the launch represents a shift in how training, penetration testing, and incident response can be measured and improved.
Why click rates fall short
Traditional phishing simulations typically measure how many employees click on a link. That metric no longer tells the full story. Attackers use SMS, voice calls, messaging apps, and social platforms to get around defenses.
Bobby Ford, Chief Strategy and Experience Officer at Doppel, told Help Net Security that organizations need better visibility. “A more meaningful metric is a social engineering susceptibility score, a measure of how likely an organization is to fall victim to manipulation across multiple channels, not just email,” he explained. This approach lets CISOs see risk across phone calls, help desk interactions, or executive activity on social platforms.
That broader view translates directly into operational improvements. Ford said it allows teams to recognize and escalate suspicious activity earlier, tune playbooks to match real-world threats, and give boards measurable updates on resilience.
Realistic lures built by AI
Attackers increasingly use AI to craft personalized lures that appear authentic. Doppel Simulation aims to replicate this shift. The product can gather public information such as vendor relationships or details from an executive’s upcoming event, then weave it into realistic scenarios.
According to Ford, this changes the expectations for resilience training. “Legacy email defenses, trained to spot misspellings or crude patterns, often let these realistic attacks pass. For example, our simulation product can craft a message to a finance leader referencing publicly available information about contracts and suppliers. A traditional filter would see nothing unusual about this. But in a simulation, the organization can discover whether the employee escalates or falls for it, and whether secondary controls need to be established.”
For CISOs, the shift is away from training employees to spot only obvious scams, and toward testing the organization’s ability to handle highly contextualized, multi-step social engineering attempts.
Turning threats into training
A standout feature of the new tool is its integration with Doppel Vision. Threats detected against a brand or executive can instantly be turned into simulations. Ford compared the effect to preparing for a football game by practicing against the team you are about to face, rather than running generic drills.
“In practice, when Doppel Vision flags a phishing kit or social engineering campaign targeting an executive, that exact attack vector can be deployed in a simulation against the organization,” he said. The result is twofold: security teams find out whether the attack would have succeeded, and employees learn to recognize the specific tactics an adversary is already using.
This approach ensures organizations train against what is coming. Ford added that he has seen how powerful this method can be, recalling how a past employer used the details of a HR-targeted scam in training and saw immediate improvements in vigilance.
What CISOs can do with it
For CISOs, Doppel’s announcement reflects a broader trend: training and testing need to be continuous, personalized, and tied to threats. The platform generates role-specific scenarios, provides coaching based on user behavior, and builds a risk profile that can be tracked over time.
Ford stressed that the aim is measurable risk reduction. By mapping susceptibility across roles and functions, security leaders can prioritize where to invest resources and remediation. That can mean reinforcing frontline staff who manage phone requests, supporting executives who are active on social media, or bolstering finance teams against highly specific lures.
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