Protecting your business from phishing attacks

Phishing is the type of fraudulent practice of social engineering attack by sending emails or other electronic communication methods purporting to be from a reputable companies as a trusted entity, dupes the victim by inducing the individual to reveal personal information such as passwords and credit card numbers and other details by unwittingly volunteering to reveal personal details. They can be in the form of email telephone or text message. A major portion of data theft involved in phishing is by using secured email gateway ( S E G ) . There are different type of emails which need to be consistently detected to avoid email phishing attacks once the mail lands in your mailbox.

Phishing victims are tricked into disclosing information which generally nobody except the victim should be aware of. The cyber criminals act as a trusted source and make the victim reveal their date of birth, Social Security number, phone number, credit card details, home address, password information. Once the cyber criminals get all the information they require then they impersonate the victim and do all the fraudulent and illegal activities in the name of the victim, like applying for credit card and then making huge purchases or applying for loan and then not repaying it etc.

Typically spear phishing emails use urgent and familiar languages to encourage the victims to act immediately. Sometimes the victim is directed by a link to a spoofed version of a popular website which is designed to look like a real one and ask them to confirm and update their secret details. The cyber criminals can also hack a familiar website and then direct website visitor to a fake website and extract all the information and also steal the confidential information stored in the server. If the victim clicks an email attachment which looks valid like PDFs, e-book, etc then also there is a possibility of him being cheated.

Everybody should be careful when using public Wi-Fi access at coffee shops, airports, hospitals, etc some criminals use voice phishing method. The voice Mail urges the recipient to respond immediately or their bank account will be closed and most of the time they are successful in convincing the victim. A phishing mail can even trick two people into believing that they are sending the asked information to each other but in reality the Phisher is sending fake email to each of them. The phisher tries to enter a corporate or governmental network where the employees are tricked to bypass security. The victim organisation then faces a severe financial loss and loss of reputation and customer trust. Victim should be careful of the following points :

–                     The users should always be vigilant.

–                     He should read the mail sincerely and seriously and find for spelling mistakes or change in the name of the domain.

–                     He should be attentive enough to realise and think as to why this email needs all the information and why he has received it.

–                     The user should adopt to fix two factor authentication ( 2FA )as an effective method to counter phishing attacks. It acts as an extra layer and also needs verification to log into sensitive applications. This prevents the criminals from penetrating the network.

–                     The user should change the password frequently and they should not use a common password for all the different applications.

–                     The users should be aware and alert so as not to click on external email links. Web applications firewall blocks malicious request at the edge of the network.

Use of antivirus softwares, anti-spyware softwares, anti-phishing toolbar, gateway email filter, web securing gateway, spam filter, and phishing filters from Vendors such as Microsoft should be done. The user should block all messages except for those that have been cryptographically signed thereby blocking unsolicited emails more effectively.

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