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.

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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.

Ransomware Attacks Your Organization’s Ability to Function

Ransomware Attacks Your Organization’s Ability to Function

by | Sep 26, 2018 | Phishing Protection

By the time any business is aware that they are the target of a ransomware attack, it’s too late. Once a hacker has breached security and enticed a user to click on a malicious link or attachment, access to local data on that employee’s computer is locked. In order to unlock the data, a ransom must be paid. In about 91% of cases, the vector for ransomware is incoming email, often in the form of a spear phishing attack that purports to be from a sender known and trusted by the victim.

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The Threat Of Ransomware is Real

The Threat Of Ransomware is Real

by | Sep 6, 2018 | Phishing Protection

Ransomware is a multi-million dollar a year online business that can strike any organization.

Both Ransomware and legitimate business engage in email marketing campaigns with the intent of making sales to new customers. In the case of legitimate business, some good or service of value is returned to the client. In the case of ransomware, business is slowed or halted by malware that locks or deletes files, and a ransom is demanded that may or may not stop the attack or reverse the damage if paid. Ransomware is criminal but make no mistakes: its top producers make millions of dollars a year in revenue.

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Are You Ready To Meet The Threat Of Locky Ransomware?

Are You Ready To Meet The Threat Of Locky Ransomware?

by | Aug 9, 2018 | Phishing Protection

Locky is a ransomware variant that was first reported in 2016.

The most common version of the attack arrives as an attachment to an email. When opened, the attachment is mostly unreadable, except for a direction to the user to enable macros in order to make the content readable. If this is done however, an embedded macro in the “message” runs and saves the Locky virus to the user’s hard drive. After that, typically any Microsoft Office files, videos, and images on the hard drive are encrypted through the office 365 phishing email.

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Phishing is a Threat – Protect Yourself!

by | Jul 19, 2018 | Phishing Protection

The overwhelming majority of attempts to compromise the security of business information today being with a phishing attack. By relying on the misplaced trust of users, phishing, spear-fishing, and whaling attacks gain access to confidential data: users click a link, open an attachment from a “trusted source,” respond to a social engineering attempt, or are otherwise tricked into revealing such information.

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Advanced Threat Defense Helps Your Organization Mitigate Phishing Scams

Advanced Threat Defense Helps Your Organization Mitigate Phishing Scams

by | Jul 12, 2018 | Phishing Protection

Every day, there is an increasing number of phishing and spear fishing threats, which cause disruption and damaging loss of revenue to companies worldwide.

These scams are crafted with the sole purpose of getting your employees to reveal passwords, security credentials, business secrets, and other information which would otherwise remain secure. So-called phishing scams are responsible for the vast majority of hacking attacks against corporations and individuals today.

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DuoCircle Sponsoring LetsEncrypt.org

DuoCircle Sponsoring LetsEncrypt.org

by | Apr 25, 2018 | Phishing Protection

DuoCircle’s Advanced Threat Defense automatically generates SSL-certified domains for anti-phishing protection

At DuoCircle, we prioritize privacy and understand the need for encryption on the Web. We are passionate advocates for free speech, and the need to make encrypted connections ubiquitous online. We are happy to announce our sponsorship of Let’s Encrypt a market and thought leader in SSL and privacy online. While we are not a web hosting company that would benefit from issuing SSL certificates with each website we still believe in using the best of breed technology in all of our offerings. We specifically engineered our Advanced Threat Defense system for malware and phishing protection to utilize Let’s Encrypt certificates for our client domains.  (more…)

Are You Ready To Meet The Threat Of Locky Ransomware?

Phishing Protection for Businesses

by | Feb 13, 2018 | Phishing Protection

Protect your end users from email-based exploits

Last year was a rough year for malware and phishing. 2017 kicked off with hacking and malware infections making news in early January when an effective phishing scam targeted Google Gmail users by tricking them into sharing their login credentials. And now as we close out the year, these types of brazen frauds have not slowed down, in fact it has gotten worse.
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Are You Ready To Meet The Threat Of Locky Ransomware?

7 Ways to Protect Your Organization from Email-based Ransomware Attacks

by | Feb 10, 2018 | Phishing Protection

How email-based ransomware works and how to prevent attacks

Ransomware has become the largest, most dangerous malware threat to date. It affects individuals, businesses, and governments around the world by holding hard drive data hostage. The cost of ransomware infections was projected to exceed US$5 billion by the end of this year, according to this report from Cybersecurity Ventures. Costs go far beyond dealing directly with a ransomware attack. In many cases, organizations had to reduce or cease operations until the ransomware was removed. Lost business, damage to reputation, and lawsuits further added to the burden of cost for businesses that fell victim to ransomware attacks. (more…)

Quickbooks Phishing Email Live Walkthrough

Quickbooks Phishing Email Live Walkthrough

by | Oct 27, 2016 | Phishing Protection

Hilton and I were talking and he mentioned to me that he got a great looking phishing email in his Yahoo account, so I decided to take a quick look at the format and believability of the message to see if it would fool the average user. I was VERY surprised at how well this message was formatted and you’ll see that during my review a second less. (more…)

Are You Ready To Meet The Threat Of Locky Ransomware?

65% of Global Businesses Ill-Equipped to Defend Against Email-Based Cyber-Attacks

by | Mar 28, 2016 | Phishing Protection

If you believe your company is handling email security without any problems, the odds are you’re sadly mistaken. A recent Mimecast survey of IT security professionals found that 65% of them felt that their organization wasn’t capable of handling email-based cyber-attacks. A full third of them felt that their email was actually less secure than it was five years ago. (more…)

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