Best Phishing Protection Tips & Tricks To Safeguard Your Organization’s Valuable Assets
Staying secure from phishing attempts is essential for all standard organizations and individuals today as they can lead to huge losses. The best phishing protection strategies must always be based on a strong knowledge base regarding the various phishing methods used by malicious actors and a phishing email’s distinctive characteristics. Also, an organization’s employees must be sufficiently educated on these factors to know how to detect phishing attacks at the earliest instance. Another essential step is the use of effective anti-phishing software solutions.
Table of Contents
What To Be Cautious About In An Email
The first important step for email phishing prevention is to know how to investigate phishing emails. A phishing email will have specific characteristics that help in identifying it as a malicious attempt. Here are the most common ones.
Emails Coming From An Unknown Source
If the sender sends an email from an organization that doesn’t exist and asks the user to reveal their confidential details, it is most likely a phishing attempt. Identification of such factors is the first step to best phishing protection practices.
The Email Received Is from An Unknown Domain
Along with the sender’s name, look for the sender’s email address too. Sometimes, it could be from a domain not generally known, which indicates a possible phishing attempt.
Incorrect Spelling Or Grammar
Legitimate organizations will always send emails with accurate spelling and grammar, which the malicious actors often neglect. Spelling mistakes are a possible indication of phishing.
Creation Of Urgency
Phishing emails mention short deadlines to create a sense of urgency, like asking for a response within 24 hours.
Unsolicited Attachments
If the attachments sent sound suspicious, it is likely with the intention of phishing.
Ways To Prevent Phishing
The threat of phishing could be a nightmare to many. However, proper awareness and appropriate mitigation steps can help in handling it efficiently. The following information shows how to stop phishing emails effectively.
Awareness And Employee Education
Educating the organization’s employees not to click on a malicious link or attachment is a significant measure. After checking the link with the cursor, the user should refrain from clicking it if it seems strange. Unfamiliar attachment should also go to the trash.
Incident Reporting System
An appropriate reporting service must be implemented to notify suspected phishing emails immediately as a part of phishing prevention best practices. The security team can then respond to them. The users have the essential controls to defeat phishing. When they learn to quickly and accurately identify a phishing email among legitimate emails, malicious actors can no longer pose a threat.
Installing a Phishing Prevention Software
Application control solutions like cloud-based cybersecurity software can detect unusual behavior and prevent malicious files from attacking an organization. A good antivirus program can also include phishing prevention tools. Useful phishing prevention software will do the following to protect the user’s device or network
- Block malicious emails before even reaching the user’s inbox
- Inspect suspicious URLs
- Provide customizable settings as per the organization’s requirements
- Recognize illegitimate domain name
Monitoring, Detection, and Response
Due to the ever-growing threat, it is essential to quickly and accurately detect the visited malicious links and attachments downloaded. A managed detection and response solution continuously monitors customers’ workstations and servers for malicious software and suspicious behavior. When a user clicks on a suspicious email, it detects activity and runs a behavior-based threat-detection tool to conduct a remedy and cleanup process without delay.
Ways To Prevent Spoofing
Spoofing is an integral part of many phishing emails. Hence, guidelines on how to mitigate phishing attacks must include information on spoofing and solutions to prevent it. Some of the advanced tools to thwart spoofing attempts are given below.
Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
It is an anti-spoofing program in which the sender’s domain is authenticated, thereby preventing email spoofing.
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)
DKIM validates a domain name identity associated with a message through cryptographic authentication.
Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, And Conformance (DMARC)
The DMARC protocol adds links to the author’s domain name for email authentication.
Phishing is one of the worst threats, and it is ever-growing. However, in this advanced era of technology and thought, there are appropriate countermeasures too. Having profound awareness of phishing, using robust anti-phishing software solutions, and educating employees adequately on how to prevent phishing and spoofing attempts at the first instance are the best phishing protection strategies any organization must implement in their business communication policies.
Join the thousands of organizations that use DuoCircle
Find out how affordable it is for your organization today and be pleasantly surprised.