Understanding and Preventing Phishing Attacks Posted: January 30, 2023 @ 4:59 am

What is Phishing Attack?

While knowing about what is a phishing attack, you can say that a Phishing attack is a kind of fraudulent activity or cybersecurity threat that is done to target users directly to steal their confidential data or information comprising banking details, credit/debit card details, and many more. We can also call it a social engineering attack that is done via text, call, email, or other ways. In this, electronic communications are used in a deceitful way to betray and take advantage of users.

Phishing attackers manipulate the victims to perform specific activities such as clicking on a suspicious link or getting an OTP from them. By using them, they get access to sensitive information. These types of attacks put both organizations and individuals at risk. Phishing attacks tend to be enormously profitable techniques for cybercriminals as they grab thousands of victims yearly.

They don’t do it one way as there are multiple types of phishing attacks. Some of them include-

Email Phishing
Clone Phishing
Spear Phishing Attack
Pharming Phishing
HTTPS Phishing
Vishing and Smishing Phishing
Evil Twin Phishing
Pop-up Phishing
Whaling Phishing
Angler Phishing

Apart from Phishing, there are other cybersecurity threats as well used by attackers including Malware attacks, Weak Passwords, Ransomware, Insider Threats, and more. Knowing how these attacks work will help you to detect and prevent them.

How Phishing Works?

One way to prevent different Phishing techniques used by defrauders is to know how they work. Let’s navigate to how Phishing work. It starts with the threat or link sent via any communication and the sender acts like someone familiar or trusted party. The sender depicts recipient must take an action and the victim falls for it. Their action opens the gate for the sender to access all the sensitive data which could cost them a lot. Get some more insights about Phishing attacks here:

The Sender: In Phishing, the sender acts like someone trustworthy so that they can make the receiver click on the link sent by them or call or message. It can be anything. The sender can pretend to be a family member, an individual, someone from the office, or another. In most cases, the sender imitates messages as emails from big-scale firms like Amazon, PayPal, Microsoft, banks, government offices, or others.
The Message: This stage is where the attacker pretenses someone trusted to ask the recipient to click a link, send money, answer the call, or download any attachment. When the receiver opens the link or message, they will see some changes happening to their device, it can be hanged, or files may be corrupted, or they can have multiple replicas, etc. The message might also ask the receiver to go to some other platform or take immediate action that can cost them serious outcomes.
The Outcome: When the recipient clicks on the sent link, they are directed to some other unauthenticated website. Here the victim has to enter the credentials and then, their information will go to the attacker. This is the way through which attackers steal identities, sell people’s personal information in the black market, embezzle cash from bank accounts, and so on.

How to Safeguard Yourself from Phishing Attacks?

There are thousands of phishing attacks attempted by scammers to steal victims’ bank account credentials, personal information, etc. It is common for individuals and organizations to get suspicious emails or messages that can be dangerous for their data and cause them a lot of detriment. For this, they must take the help of software companies to apply necessary actions to their system.

Some specific phishing attacks can be performed only on particular people. Apart from that, anyone can be attacked by fraudsters. Below we have provided some sort of ways to prevent these kinds of scams and phishing attacks, check out them-

1. Never Submit Your Personal Data

Every phishing email or call will try to get your personal information by tricking you. They will ask you for providing them with your banking details, passwords, credit or debit card information, or others. Some ways they apply to do these include verification of account information or sending you a secure link that redirects to a suspicious website that fetches your information.

2. Never Tell Anyone Your Passwords

If you got a call from a bank or any of your trusted sources and they ask you to confirm your password, immediately report them and never provide them any passwords. Also, it is necessary to keep changing your passwords on all the accounts you have for appropriate security reasons. Users can also apply a multi-factor authentication process to stop any unauthorized access to their accounts.

3. Check Account Statements Frequently

Never avoid reviewing statements of bank accounts to see if there is any unidentified transaction that you can’t verify. If there is something, report it immediately to bank authorities. Also, if you are receiving your bank account statement late, you need to find out why as there can be any kind of scamming. Therefore, it will be good to review the account activities often to know about suspicious activities.

4. Know About All Phishing Techniques

It is significant to have details about all kinds of phishing techniques to prevent attacks. When having a problem, sometimes, businesses cannot find a suitable IT company that can help them immediately. Hence, they should be aware of all kinds of phishing techniques and their prevention techniques to not get stuck in the middle of any situation.

5. Be Careful Before Clicking on Any Link!

Scammers send victims a lot of phishing emails and messages including suspicious links that take them to another website. Here, people need to analyze everything they get or read and should verify it first before clicking any of the links. They must get an idea of where it came from and its authenticity.

6. Get an Updated Browser

To provide the security an extra layer of protection, your system must have an updated browser as it is easy to hack an older version of the browser for scammers. Businesses can download it by themselves or can take the help of any software company. It is necessary to consider any update you get for your system as newer versions have advanced security features that prevent attackers to steal the information. Not updating the browser can put your system at risk.

7. Set up Firewalls & Antivirus Software

Installing Firewalls and Antivirus software into your system is one of the most secure ways to halt external strikes. These act as protection between your system and the attacker. If any user has these both in their system, they have got high-end security with fewer chances of hacking and misusing their data by any third party.

8. Be Careful About Pop-Ups

User needs not get gushed by a pop-up appearing on their system as they can be suspicious and a part of attackers’ strategy. To prevent it, you can install one of the browsers that allow users to have ad-blocker software. It will not let users see unwanted ads by blocking them automatically. If any of the ads still manage to escape the blocker, then, users must not click them just like that.

9. Use Multi-Factor Authentication

Apart from having security solutions from a well-known mobile application development company, businesses must also apply a multi-factor authentication system against all kinds of phishing techniques and cyber threats. Various business applications are providing this multi-layered architecture to offer extra security.

10. Back Up the Data

To get advanced security, it will be good for users to back up their data on their system, on the cloud, to an external hard drive, or anywhere else to keep it safe. Backing up the data is beneficial in numerous ways such as if someday your system gets corrupted, or someone hacks it or you need to delete it, then, at least somewhere you have its backup and don’t have to worry about data loss.

How Can Companies Prevent Phishing Attacks?

Organizations are the ones who need to keep the data secure on priority. If they are not able to do it somehow, then, they have to be ready for some serious consequences that they can’t afford. Despite having advanced Antivirus software, multi-factor authentication, or security features, scammers always find out ways to hack into the system.

To make them unsuccessful in doing the same, organizations need to apply some of the tactics that will keep them secure to a level, here are they-

1. Provide Employee Training Regularly

There should be more than one specific employee trained to prevent cyber threats and phishing attacks. Any of the employees can face such malicious attacks, hence, they must be aware of how to deal with them at any time. For this, organizations need to provide them with regular training that will help them understand if the system is having a phishing attack, and report the issue as per the firm policies.

2. Get a Spam Filter

At the time of a spear phishing attack, the email is only sent to some particular number of recipients and there are also used hacked email accounts sometimes. The spam filter is used to sort out these types of emails out of all the legitimate emails the organization is getting. The spam filter uses an instance-based or memory-based learning approach to analyze and distinguish these spam emails.

3. Keep Strong & Lengthy Passwords

While choosing a password, companies need to remember that it should contain a minimum of 8 letters including small letters, capital letters, a special character, a numeric number, etc. They need to change it time-to-time so that it won’t be obvious to guess for the scammer or cyber criminals. They can also use multi-factor authentication for crucial business apps.

4. Keep the System Updated with Security Patches

Every corporate system should be fortified with the latest security software and patches to protect the vast data from fraudsters. Each system used by employees should be updated with the latest features and functions, this way, it will be hard enough for attackers to hack the system.

In Essence,

Phishing attacks are common challenges faced by both individuals and companies. They both need to protect their confidential data and for this, they are required to use antivirus software, advanced security features, spam filters, multi-factor authorization, and others to prevent access of third-party to their trusted information, passwords, credit card information, etc. Though hackers have multiple ways to get into the system, here the thing to do for organizations is to identify and prevent data breaches to protect the information from phishing attacks. They can do it appropriately by taking the help of a leading software development company that has rich experience in a similar vertical.

Author:

Rohan Singh

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