It has been established that phishing has become a sophisticated practice as time goes on thus making it hard for many people or organizations to safeguard their identity. I also understand that cybercriminals are not a dummy and they are constantly developing their ways of asking for people’s identification numbers. To be protected and to protect your own company from such nasty tricks, it’s important to know about the current tendencies in phishing.
In this article, we will take a look at some of the most recent phishing techniques and methods of how one can guard against them and the need to use email filtering services so that one does not fight against phishing emails reaching the inbox.
1. Sophisticated Spear Phishing Attacks
Spear phishing is a subset of phishing that is specifically targeted at certain people or organizations by employing details of those targets. Unlike common phishing, where the attacker sends an e-mail to a large number of people, the spear phishing attacker utilizes details such as the recipient’s name position, or acquaintance with the particular recipient.
For example, a cybercriminal might impersonate a high-ranking executive and send an email to an employee requesting sensitive financial data. These emails often appear very credible, which makes them harder to detect. To combat this, businesses should employ email filtering services that help detect even the most targeted phishing attempts by analyzing patterns and known phishing tactics.
2. Business Email Compromise (BEC)
Business Email Compromise (BEC) is quickly becoming a more popular phishing technique that is aimed at businesses. It is a type of attack that involves hackers obtaining the credentials of a user of a company, especially in business emails. From this account, they are subsequently able to launch fraudulent emails with tenders for financial transactions or submission of sensitive data.
These are very adverse kinds of attacks since they originate from real internal IP addresses and so are very hard to detect. The employees have to learn the indicator of a phishing email and if received from familiar sources, it should be authenticated via a safer route. Furthermore, these companies need to dedicate their efforts to using effective email authentication techniques such as DMARC, SPF, and DKIM as well as high-end filter mechanisms to address awkward e-mail traffic.
3. Clone Phishing
Clone phishing is still regarded as a fairly contemporary strategy since criminals compose and design an email that looks, for the most part, very similar to an actual message the receiver has already received. The malicious version could contain links to other malicious websites; and emails with infected attachments. The attacker can have another link stating that the link posted earlier has been updated and the recipient is enticed to click on it.
This is likely to happen since the user is well aware of the content and therefore the trick is likely to work. In order not to fall victim to clone phishing, the users should follow up on the authenticity of the subsequent emails, especially in cases where the emails include modified links or attachments. This type of analysis is very important, first, reviewing and second, constantly questioning regular follow-up emails to be safe.
4. Voice Phishing (Vishing)
The traditional type of phishing is not only emails; there is also voice phishing also known as vishing. In vishing attacks, the fraudster dials the victim and poses as a member of a trusted organization like a bank or a government body to gain sensitive information. These schemes can be very convincing and this is in line with the attackers using a social engineering approach to gain your trust when talking to you.
Since vishing is not distinguished from legitimate and critical calls, one should not disclose any personal details on the phone even if the caller claims to be an emergency. In case one comes across such a call, one should not answer it but instead call the organization using a known number.
5. Smishing: Phishing via Text Message
Phishing attacks are conducted through the use of Short Message Service, abbreviated as “smishing”. Phone calls and messages are made in the guise of coming from organizations that are well known to the targets, in most cases, the messages are followed by a link or the I. T administrator’s request for personal details about the target. This type of scam will be appealing to many individuals since people consider text messages to be more personal than email.
As a preventive measure to smishing attacks do not respond to unsolicited text messages, particularly if the text message is a request for additional information or contains links to another page. Same with an email, when users get access to the link and get a warning of any type of scam, he/she needs to contact the organization to confirm such messages.
Conclusion
Thus, it is highly important to stay up to date with the new and changing face of phishing examples and tricks. Spear phishing and business email compromise are some of the techniques that hackers use to deceive their targets in their quest to compromise their target’s identity and secure sensitive data.
By avoiding the use of the email services that are most frequently used by attackers and using the existing email filtering services to filter the notorious emails and subjecting them to authentication, strong protection is guaranteed. Moreover, it is beneficial to design the signs of phishing schemes and expand the awareness level of the employees about how to detect and inform them about such incidents in order not to experience significant losses. It is thus essential to drive defence against such threats as phishing which can easily be effective with awareness and the right security inserted.