What is Phishing Attack?
Unwanted emails have always been a source of annoyance and there is no doubt in that!
Do you know that emails are the biggest source of cyber threats?
In fact, according to Expert Insights, 75% of organizations worldwide suffered a phishing attack in 2020. Additionally, Google Safe Browsing shows that the phishing sites rose to 75 times as many as there are malware sites on the internet.
The purpose of deploying a phishing attack is to get sensitive information out of targeted individuals and companies. The information could be of gaining access to protected data, network, or any confidential information.
A phishing attack is a social engineering attack, deployed to trick people into giving their confidential information such as user credentials, company data, financial information, etc.
They are deployed with an approach of “quantity over quality.” Large organizations are at risk of phishing attacks because of their sheer size of employees. Often big-sized organizations remain vulnerable to menacing phishing attacks and hold high chances of having security loopholes.
The main reason being the more the company has a large number of employees the more the chances of one or two employees falling for the trap. And that is enough for the cyber criminals to take down the company. An entire company can be put in jeopardy of future uncertainty.
However, the worse is there is also a certain type of cyber attacks similar to phishing that is designed specifically to target an individual or company.
Spear Phishing
This type of cyber attack does not resemble any of the general emails of phishing attempts. Rather, attackers gather complete information of targeted users to fill their emails with more authentic content. In some cases, attackers hijack their business email communication to create highly customized emails.
Clone Phishing
It is the cleverest attempt of a phishing attack where attackers make a clone or nearly identical copy of legitimate email messages. Furthermore, attackers replace attachments in the email chain with a malicious file or link.
Whaling
When an attacker decides to take spear phishing on a big, high-profile target level, it becomes a whaling attack. This attack specifically looks out for high targets such as senior executives of an organization. Since they hold a high amount of internal data access than any employee in the organization.
How to Prevent Phishing Attack?
On average, an employee receives 4.8% of phishing emails per week. Moreover, almost one-third of these emails make it past the default security systems of an organization. This further leaves your company completely in a perilous situation. To avoid being a target of a phishing attack, you can follow these preventive measures:
- Always be alert with emails that look suspicious, it may hold tell-tale signs of phished email like:
- Poor content presentation
- Grammar and spelling mistakes
- Unknown sender address
- Unexpected attachments or documents
- Suspicious URLs which might redirect you to different webpages
- Emails sounding with a sense of unsuspected urgency
- Incorporate two methods of identity verification for your passwords and device to keep updated on insusceptible activities happening around worldwide.
- Educate your employees with cyber security awareness tools for the best prevention tactics against the latest cyber attacks. ThreatCop, a cyber-security awareness tool is highly considered and appreciated across the globe for its amazing preventive features against attack vectors.
Introducing ThreatCop
ThreatCop is a phishing simulation tool that offers the best training for phishing prevention and other 5 attack vectors. That is ransomware, smishing, cyber scam, vishing, and removable media. It is an explicit employee awareness tool that offers to convert humans into the strongest link in the chain of cyber security in an organization.
ThreatCop is a people risk assessment and cyber awareness tool that analyzes the organization’s security vulnerability level by executing real-time simulation attacks on a selected group of individuals.
The tool runs a dummy replication of an attack based on the latest cyber threats to alert and empower employees. Apart from simulation cyber attacks, this amazing tool also imparts knowledge based on vulnerability level with lecture videos, PDFs, presentations, info-graphics, advisories, etc.
You can also have regular cumulative assessments through the latest quiz tests based on the analysis report of your organization. Moreover, ThreatCop provides Simulation 2.0, a final simulation attack to check the level of pro-activeness of employees in the organization.
Even a slight loophole or little vulnerability can leave your organization as a targeted victim of a phishing attack. Simulation 2.0 gives a detailed report of the pro-activeness of employees and how much they are preventive against a phishing attack.
We often teach our employees to approach smart work rather than hard work, which saves resources and time. Similarly, they should be trained with such an approach. It is better to train them rather than losing huge costs, time, and confidential information through cyber attacks.
