With more businesses functioning online, exposure to computers and the Internet has increased manifold. Thus, you have cybercriminals growing in number as well. Hackers are becoming more intelligent than before. However, phishing is still the top threat among all breaches analyzed over the past one year. Therefore, it has become imperative for business organizations to know about phishing and phishing protection methods to apply to prevent them.
We shall now talk about some of the common types of phishing and see how organizations can defend themselves against them.
Emails appear to originate from a recognized sender.
Steals data by impersonating a genuine provider.
In this type of phishing, the cybercriminals impersonate a legitimate provider to steal personal information such as credit card details or login credentials of financial institutions. One example of such deceptive phishing is that of PayPal scammers.
Hackers send out emails to recipients to click on a link to ‘rectify specific discrepancy’ in their accounts. However, the link directs the recipients to a fake PayPal Login Page that the hacker uses to steal info. As a user, one should verify all the URLs carefully and look for spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, or generic salutations, and be vigilant to tackle such phishing attempts.
Spear Phishing
Characteristics of spear phishing:
Commonly observed on social media sites.
The email looks like it originates from a known sender.
Uses personalized info about the target.
As the name suggests, spear phishing is targeted-phishing. The hacker collects the target’s name, email id, organization details, work phone number, and other crucial information. The objective is to trick the target into believing that they have a connection with the sender. The hacker aims to trick the target into clicking on a spurious link or download a malicious attachment through which he/she attempts to steal personal information. One can observe such spear-phishing in social media sites like LinkedIn, where it is easy to collect information and craft a targeted attack email.
The best phishing protection methods to employ to guard against spear-phishing are:
Be careful when sharing sensitive private information with people
An automated email-analyzing solution to identify such phishing emails is the best investment to make.
CEO Fraud
Characteristics of CEO Frauds:
It usually targets top-level executives.
The objective is to authorize fraudulent financial transactions.
Obtain crucial tax info on all employees.
The modus operandi of the cybercriminals is simple in this type of phishing attack. They try to get hold of the login details of a top enterprise executive. In doing so, the hackers impersonate the CEO or high-ranking official to authorize the financial transactions of the business organization. The criminals also use the same email account to request the taxation or W-2 information of all employees. This information has a high demand on the dark web.
Usually, you do not see high-ranking officials or CEOs participating in the employee phishing awareness programs. Hence, it becomes easy for hackers to target this exclusive group. Here are some phishing protection methods to counter such threats.
Ensure that the top-ranked executives take part in phishing awareness training programs so that they do not become vulnerable targets.
Make sure that the business organization adopts multi-level authentication for authorizing financial transactions.
Pharming
As a result of business organizations adopting phishing awareness programs and the like, the awareness levels of the employees are now high. Hence, it has become challenging for cybercriminals to choose the traditional phishing scams. Therefore, they resort to a new type of phishing known as pharming.
Characteristics of pharming:
Redirect the victim to a malicious website.
Change the IP address associated with a specific website.
Leverage cache-poisoning against DNS servers.
The Internet uses the Domain Name System to convert alphabetical websites to a numerical form to locate and direct visitors easily. The DNS cache poisoning attack entails the hacker targeting a DNS server and changes the IP address associated with the alphabetical name of the website. Thus, the cybercriminal redirects users to a malicious website of their choice. The problem with pharming is that the victim experiences the same issue even when he/she enters the correct site name instead of clicking on the link.
Use only HTTPS-protected websites as far as possible.
Have an updated anti-virus software solution installed on your computer networks.
Ensure to update your security patches regularly.
We have discussed four innovative methods of phishing adopted by cybercriminals all over the world and examined the phishing protection methods that one should use to tackle such phishing attempts. Ultimately, it boils down to two aspects:
Have up to date security systems installed on your computers.
Increase your awareness levels and be vigilant at all times.
These are the most straightforward phishing protection methods you can employ at all times.
Constantly working to save Google and its users from serious threats, the Threat Analysis Group (TAG) continues to publish analyses on various evolving threats like commercial surveillance vendors, serious criminal operators, and government-backed attackers. Continuing the legacy, they recently shared intelligence on a new segment of attackers called hack-for-hire. Such hackers focus on compromising victims’ accounts and extracting data as a service. Read on to know more about this group.
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Social engineering serves as an open back door for cybercriminals. Attackers don’t bother to create an elaborate plan of how to get into a company’s system. Phishing can guarantee their goal will be achieved. According to Verizon’s 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report, this attack is leading the top of breaches in 2020 with 38%. That explains the serious financial company losses due to phishing. Let’s find out what it is and how to identify it.
$5.3 billion – this is the FBI’s estimate of the total losses in the last three years suffered by businesses around the world to phishing attacks. Understandably, phishing is a severe crime in the cyber world. These cyber-attacks are successful because people fall prey to them very quickly, through spoofed emails. It’s not as easy as it sounds to protect from phishing since the attackers are nowadays using new and ingenious technologies.
Cybercrimes such as spear phishing, SMiShing, and phishing have been statistically proven to be increasing at a high pace. The rise in the sophistication and effectiveness of methods used by cybercriminals is leading to a very pressing need to improve on the cybersecurity and control mechanisms of organizations and adopting to anti-phishing solutions.
Ideal for users who work in a team, Dropbox is the place where all their team’s content comes together. It is the world’s smartest workplace, which helps team members cut through the clutter and bring to the surface, things which matter the most. Users can store their files in a safe place, and access them through a computer, phone, or tablet. They need to login to Dropbox, and all the changes they make will sync across all the accounts. Dropbox makes team management super simple. Team members can send an e-mail to Dropbox, and keep their projects moving forward.
Enterprises encounter various online threats while thriving in the digital age. Online identity theft happens to be one of the prime threats that all businesses need to address. Identity theft refers to any instance of an unauthorized entity using an entity’s confidential identification data to impersonate them for malicious purposes. Such information includes addresses, names, email addresses, login credentials like username and password, passport numbers, driving license numbers, social security numbers, or bank details.
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The one thing you could always count on with a phishing page is that something would give it away as a phishing page. After all, it’s not the real page, so there must be something different about it. Protecting yourself from a phishing attack simply came down to being able to identify the clue that gave away the web page as a phishing page. But what if attackers could find a way to phish you with the legitimate page you actually intend to visit? There wouldn’t be any clues giving it away as a fake page because it isn’t. That would be a problem, and unfortunately that problem has become reality.
The first wave of pandemic-related phishing attacks targeted vulnerable employees and consumers. There wereattacks that used home delivery services andattacks that used travel-related services. There wereattacks on spoofed resumes andattacks on the SBA’s Office of Disaster Assistance. Now hackers have moved on to the gainfully employed by attacking the virtual private networks (VPN) that remote workers use to connect to the office while working remotely.
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The latest Threat Intelligence Report is out. Its findings are based on an analysis of 195 billion emails analyzed from January through June 2020. Of that large number, an astonishing 47% were flagged as malicious or spam.
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If you take an email security awareness training class, you’ll learn a dozen ways to spot phishing email. There are a lot of clues. Maybe the email contains poor spelling or grammar. Or maybe it contains an offer that’s just too good to be true. All of those are giveaways. But there is one clue that’s a more reliable predictor of a phishing email than any other one: the “from” address. If you truly know who the email is from, you’ll know whether or not it’s legitimate.
There are a lot of companies that depend on their employees to stop phishing attacks. In effect, their employees are their last line of defense. Seeing as how the cost of phishing attacks is now in the tens of billions of dollars per year (nobody knows the exact amount since victims are so reluctant to come forward), it seems like the employees stopping phishing attacks thing isn’t working too well. And now we know why.
