Phishing Protection

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.

Phishing Protection Service

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Deceptive Phishing

Characteristics of deceptive phishing:

  • Most prevalent among all types of phishing.
  • 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:

  • Train your employees to identify phishing attempts
  • 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.

The phishing protection methods to handle pharming are:

  • 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.


Why Most Phishing Prevention Advice Falls Short

Why Most Phishing Prevention Advice Falls Short

Phishing attacks are everywhere, and so is advice for how to prevent them. None of the advice offered is wrong, it’s just woefully incomplete.

A recent article on the Security Week website, Business Email Compromise Still Reigns, discusses the FBI’s annual Internet Crime Complaints Center (IC3) report and why business email compromise (BEC)—a type a phishing attack—is so prevalent.

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How One Successful Phishing Attack Lead to Forced Early Retirement

How One Successful Phishing Attack Lead to Forced Early Retirement

If you ever find yourself the victim of a phishing attack and ransomware, you’ll only have a few options to try and deal with your circumstances.

Today, successful ransomware attacks involve stolen or encrypting the victim’s data. And to get it back, you have to pay the ransom. Of course, paying the ransom is no guarantee that you’ll get your data back, but it’s certainly higher than not paying it.

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Seriously? Over 1 Billion Records Leaked in One Month

Seriously? Over 1 Billion Records Leaked in One Month

That’s more than 30% of people on the planet with internet access. In one month! All of that during April 2019, bringing the annual total to 5.64 billion. I wonder what will happen in May.

An article on IT Governance Blog details all of the cyber-attacks, ransomware, data breaches and financial information that was compromised during the most recent month. There’s over 70 in the list including 25 healthcare providers and 19 schools and government agencies. I doubt the list is complete.
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Game of Thrones Phishing Scams: What Do You Need To  Know?

Game of Thrones Phishing Scams: What Do You Need To Know?

The last season of Game of Thrones (GoT) is finally on air, and everyone seems to be excited about it! GoT is one of the most successful shows ever to be shown on TV. However, the massive popularity of the show has lead to cybercriminals exploiting people’s love for it by tricking individuals into various online scams, and many people have lost their hard earned money by fraudulent emails in circulation nowadays.

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Phishing Prevention Technology: Why Aren’t Municipalities Onboard?

If you haven’t heard lately, when it comes to getting phished, municipalities and local governments aren’t doing too well. And it’s costing them a lot of money.

According to a recent article on SC Magazine website, four different municipalities were hit with ransomware attacks during the week of April 15, 2019. The article said, “Augusta, Maine; Imperial County, Calif.; Stuart, Fla.; and Greenville, N.C. were all in different stages of recovering from ransomware attacks over the last seven days.”

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Top Phishing Targets by Industry: 2019 Edition

Top Phishing Targets by Industry: 2019 Edition

Phishing attacks are becoming more prevalent across almost all industries worldwide. But some industries are targeted more frequently than others.

Email fraud remains one of the most common ways cybercriminals gain unauthorized access to their victims’ IT systems. Now, however, cybercriminals are beginning to expand their attacks to include more sophisticated tactics that rely on email, social media, and even victims’ mobile devices. You need more than email security to protect yourself against phishing.

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Microsoft Office 365: A Phishing Attack Waiting to Happen

Microsoft Office 365: A Phishing Attack Waiting to Happen

There are a lot of benefits to using Microsoft Office 365. It contains business tools with which you’re already familiar. It’s easy to set up and offers anytime, anywhere access.

You’ll see many of these features and benefits promoted on the Office 365 website. Won’t you want to see there among the list though is that using Office 365 makes you extremely vulnerable to a phishing attack. Why is that?

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There’s Nothing Sexy About Sextortion

There’s Nothing Sexy About Sextortion

There was a time when hackers and email scammers used spear phishing to trick their victims into sending money. By the time someone figured what had happened, the money was gone forever. But, people are starting to get wise to that tactic. So, what do the hackers do? They evolve…all the way to blackmail.

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Phishing in the News

Phishing in the News

If You Think Phishing Is Only Your Employer’s Problem Think Again

If you work for a company, you probably think about phishing attacks in a distant sort of way. In other words, phishing may be a problem, but it’s not your problem, really. It’s your employers’. Right? Wrong.

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The Latest Phishing Trends Traced to Russia

The Latest Phishing Trends Traced to Russia

Russia and its hackers have been popular in the news for the past several years. Whether to allegedly influence foreign elections or steal intellectual property its sphere of influence is worldwide.

But first a bit of history.

How did we get to this point in time? Countries have always been involved with clandestine activities to undermine or even overthrow neighboring governments. They have used deception and sometimes even force to accomplish their goals. So it was only a matter of time before technology was embraced as a tool to this end. And so began the partnership between hacker and government.

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Spear Phishing Prevention for Small and Medium Size Businesses

Spear Phishing Prevention for Small and Medium Size Businesses

What is spear phishing?

Spear phishing is when you receive an email from someone or some company you trust. It looks legitimate. It may even have the names and extension number of coworkers. It looks authentic, so you don’t give it a second thought. But you should, because it’s from an attacker, and they’re trying to steal your valuable information. Do you have reliable email phishing prevention security?

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Top Phishing Email Attacks Worldwide in 2018

Top Phishing Email Attacks Worldwide in 2018

 

2018 was a good or bad year for phishing or phishing prevention depending on which side of the law you were on! Phishing is defined in many places on the internet, but I like the Cambridge Dictionary definition the best: “an attempt to trick someone into giving information over the internet or by email that would allow someone else to take money from them, for example by taking money out of their bank account”.

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