It is a well-known fact that most of us in this digital era leaves behind our track or digital footprint online. While we don’t often get into troubles for doing so, our digital trails may be all that is needed by savvy scammers to get the better of us. There’s a scam operation called spear phishing that relies on information that is available online about a person or an organization to take advantage of them and to obtain illegal gains from them.
Phishing is a kind of cyber-attack that is increasingly growing in popularity among hackers due to its simplicity of use and high potential rewards should the attacks prove to be successful. Phishing is usually done via email, popup ads, or even calls and involves deceptively fooling users into taking some action that ends up compromising them.
Though phishing has its origins in the mid-1990s, it has gained tremendous relevance today. The entire business world relies on email as its prime communication channel. As email traffic has increased over the years, so have phishing attempts. Hence, it becomes essential for IT and Email admins to be constantly on their toes and keep employing innovative strategies to keep phishing at bay. The following Email Security and Phishing Safety Guide endeavors to touch upon these aspects.
Cybercriminals invade into your enterprise’s information systems and figure out new ways and new vulnerabilities to execute more sophisticated phishing attacks. Human, time and again have proved to be the weakest link in the security chain before organizations take some preventive measures to stop phishing.
‘Anti Phishing Services’ are used to prevent phishing attacks against the individuals, systems or organizations.
Cybercriminals use malicious social engineering techniques to extract information from unsuspecting users, to launch phishing breaches. Website email scams and phishing email scams are the two most common methods used by attackers. A 2020 phishing attack survey by Greathorn reveals that IT leaders were remediating 1,185 phishing attacks each month, that’s an average of 40 each day! To help business leaders get a peek into the havoc these phishing attacks can cause, we have compiled a list of the five deadliest phishing attacks of the 21st century.
A Microsoft report points out that there has been a 35% rise in phishing attacks. And that was not even the holiday season. Black Friday and Cyber Monday have shown around a 28% rise in online sales year after year. As promotions fill people’s inboxes, phishing agents also find it an opportunity. It gives IT security specialists a hard time. They would begin to lure the individual with enticing emails and spoofed offers. It causes the unsuspecting user to click on spurious links and share their financial credentials.
Hackers use social engineering in text messages and emails to launch phishing attacks on unsuspecting users and persuade them to share private information such as their login credentials or bank account details. Phishing schemes are becoming more advanced, and targeted attacks like spear-phishing are posing a threat to many organizations. While they deploy spam filters to counter malicious emails, the sophisticated ones quickly pass through these filters.
Ecash, the brainchild of Chaum and one of the first forms of cryptocurrency, was launched as an alternative to paper money in 1983. Such was the popularity of this “non-corporeal” currency that Digicash, the firm which was regulating this new monetary asset, was able to raise over $10 million in a decade. It was so because the general public liked the idea of getting rid of traditional money. In the year 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto launched Bitcoin, which was considered the first decentralized digital currency. Then, there was no stopping the rising popularity of cryptocurrency.
It’s that time of the year. Time for a special brand of phishing emails: holiday-themed emails.
Who doesn’t like receiving a discount code from their favourite retailer in an email promotion around the holidays? Or, a holiday e-card from a co-worker? Or, a shipping notification from UPS saying that a package is on the way? Everyone loves getting these types of emails around the holidays and hackers know it. Which is why they use these types of emails to phish you. And by all accounts, they’re planning on doing it even more this holiday season. So, you better be ready.
Those days are long gone when thieves only targeted stealing physical assets such as physical money or expensive items. Today is the time of “cyber thieves” who know stealing confidential information of business entities, and impersonating them has far higher benefits.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused havoc not only in our real world but also in the virtual one. On the brighter side of things, it has encouraged a new work culture – working from home. This development has given a tremendous boost to Microsoft, with millions of employees working from home using one Microsoft product or the other.
Every day, we see phishing scams happening around us. We read in the newspapers and on the internet that people have lost their hard-earned money to cybercriminals. What are these phishing scams, and how do they play out? What is the general modus operandi of these hackers? How do we identify a phishing scam email? What precautions can we take to ensure that we do not become victims of such scams? All these questions require answering. Let us discuss phishing scams in detail.
If you’re a retired U.S. citizen, there’s a pretty good chance you collect monthly Social Security benefits. And if you do, there’s something you should know. Hackers are coming after your money.
From an article on the AARP website, “Crooks are turning to email as a way to steal Social Security benefits, often including official-looking attachments to make them seem legit, a new warning from the government says.”
Cybersecurity is about keeping the bad guys out of your network. Whether it’s your home network or the one at work, once the bad guys get in, they can wreak all kinds of havoc. The good news, if you can call it that, is there’s really only two ways to penetrate any network: exploit equipment or exploit people. If you can stop both of these, you can keep your network safe.
If one of your Facebook friends sent you an email that said “Is this you?” with a link to a video, would you click on it to see if it’s you? If so, there’s a good chance you’re going to get phished, because you just fell for the newest Facebook phishing scam.
According to theBetter Business Bureau, “There’s a phishing scam making the rounds. If you’re a victim, you receive a message from someone you know and trust, one of your friends and family members. The message expresses they were surprised to have seen you in a video and contains a web address that’s supposed to lead you to it. You’re not in the video.” The twist here is the bad guys are using Facebook Messenger to deliver their payload.
It’s big business today. Training employees to defend themselves (and their organization) from phishing emails. And there’s a good reason for that. Phishing is big business.
It’s estimated that the average cost of a spear phishing attack is $1.6 million. So, no matter what a company spends to train its employees, if it keeps them from getting phished, it’s probably a good investment.
When you hear the word phishing, you probably think of email. And that’s exactly what the scammers want you to think so you won’t pay attention to their latest delivery mechanism: voicemail.
Phishing is generally an email that looks real, but isn’t, in an effort to get you to do something you shouldn’t. Now, fraudsters are using deepfake technology to generate audio that sounds real, but isn’t, in an effort to get you to something you shouldn’t. And that’s exactly what scammers did to the CEO of a German energy company.
The days of a hacker sitting alone at their computer screen in a dark room probing for network vulnerabilities is a thing of the past. That’s too much work. To penetrate networks today, hackers almost always enlist the help of an inside accomplice: you.
What hackers have discovered over the years is that it’s much easier to get unsuspecting humans to help them in their endeavour. This was confirmed by research and published in Proofpoint’s Human Factors Report 2019. From the report, “Over 99% of emails distributing malware required human intervention—following links, opening documents, accepting security warnings, and other behaviors—for them to be effective.”
A lot of people use a web-based calendar to track all of their comings and goings. It makes sense. A web-based calendar is a smart way to make sure you have access to your calendar no matter where you are. And one of the most popular calendars in use today is Google Calendar. But, I’ll bet you didn’t realize that Google Calendar can be a giant repository for spam.
