Phishing: A great threat to your company’s confidential data

It is an undeniable fact that companies, regardless of their size, are never safe from cyberthreat. Whether it’s a small-scale business or a huge multi-employee establishment, cyberthreats and frauds can always exploit your company’s vulnerabilities and leave your revenues in shambles. That’s right. Even your company’s high-end secured architecture is not safe from scams like phishing, which have been growing and increasing ever since the technology was introduced.

Last year in 2021, as per the Cybersecurity Threat Trends report, 90% of data breaches and cyberattacks comprised of phishing alone. What’s even scarier is, that the total loss that a single organization underwent after a phishing attack amounted to be $5.01 million. Freighting, right? Well, the complications don’t end there. With every passing day, phishing takes a new form and becomes a greater threat to your highly confidential data. After all of this, being unaware of this threat and its solutions eliminates as a choice.

Thus, we are here to break down for you the biggest cyber threat of all time- phishing and its various types. And walk you through the entire process of identifying phishing and safeguarding your company’s data from attackers. So, let’s get on with it!

Fundamentally, a phishing attack can be described as a fraudulent attempt to acquire your company’s sensitive data by pretending to be a trustworthy entity. Generally, these attacks are followed by a demand for a huge sum of money or entirely disrupting your company’s confidential data and operational works. What’s even worse is that phishing attacks can hardly ever be recognized. Phishing attackers usually use email phishing to trick people into fraud. This works by attackers enacting as a trusted identity and lures a person into opening an email and finally deceiving them into giving away credentials and important information.

But, It doesn't end there. If you thought that scam emails are the only way used by phishers to get your information, then beware, because there are tons of other methods. Let’s look at them :

Once email phishing became quite easy to track and identify, phishers developed various new ways to acquire your confidential data. Currently, there are about 10 different ways other than email phishing for phishers to trick and harm your company, both financially and operationally.

Spear phishing: Unlike email phishing that targets a wide number of people and uses the “spray and pray technique”, spear phishing is aimed at specific people within an organization. These emails usually contain more receiver-specific information and make them believe that they have a personal relationship with the sender.

Whaling: Closely resembling spear-phishing, this method also focuses on specific people but only those who are senior-level executives and have access to more intel than lower-level employees. Whaling emails use more high-pressure situations to lure the receiver into opening emails.

Smishing: Based on the Email phishing method, smishing uses text messages to target receivers rather than emails. The text messages are usually disguised as a coupon code to an offer to win something exciting.

Vishing: Voice-phishing or vishing is highly common nowadays. Rather than scamming people through emails and text messages, this technique is used by phishers to call someone and get their confidential credentials. Fraudsters generally call people using a fake voice and inform them about a fake loan or a fake opportunity and finally ask them about their credit card details or other confidential details, leading them into losing huge sums of money.

Clone Phishing: A highly effective and dangerous method of phishing is clone phishing which uses an authentic email as bait. The phisher generally clones the authentic email and attaches the malicious link to the cloned link. When the receiver opens the link, he/she is taken to a website that asks for their confidential data or implants malicious activity.

Domain Spoofing: This is a type of phishing technique where the perpetrator spoofs or creates a look-alike of the email address or the website of an authentic organization and tricks the receiver/targeted person using the spoof.

CEO Fraud: CEO fraud is the most delicate phishing technique and costs businesses billions of dollars every year. This technique allows the phisher to pose as the CEO by creating a fake email account or using an already compromised email. Using email, the attacker asks the employees for banking transactions or forward sensitive information.

Evil Twin: In this technique, the attacker creates a fake-WIFI network to which the user connects. As soon as the connection is established, the hacker immediately steals account names, passwords, login details, and also any file that the user may have downloaded or might download.

Pharming: Under this technique, the phisher attacks the DNS rather than the user’s device. The hacker causes DNS cache poisoning and changes the IP address linked with a website name. Thus, even if the user tries to open a website, they are directed to a malicious website.

Watering Hole Phishing: One of the worst phishing attacks to get hit with is Watering hole Phishing. This process generally involves using one employee's device to attack the other devices on the same network. To implement successful watering hole phishing, the attacker will infect the common website/ email used by all the devices on the same network. Ultimately, attacking them all.

With all these attacks ahead of you and ready to infect your network/ business and steal your data, all you need to do is be smart and identify them before getting attacked. How can you do it? How can you identify and avoid phishing attacks? Well, let’s see

To keep your company’s confidential information safeguarded, you, along with your employees need to identify phishing attacks and thus avoid them at all costs. How to do this? Read the following pointers:

Generally, phishing emails are quite difficult to spot and look extremely credible. But, they are not! How do we know? Well, the first way to spot a phishing or a malicious email is to look at what is written after “Hi”. Phishing emails have a huge spotting difference ie “dear”. If you find an email that greets you with a “Hi, dear”, it is best to avoid it.

It is also best to check the domain name on google before opening the email to look for authenticity. Remember, no organization would send a private email using a public domain.

Regularly change your passwords and other credentials.

ALWAYS avoid opening an attachment before being sure of the authenticity of an attachment.

If the email creates a sense of urgency, do not panic before you check its authenticity.

The best way to identify and avoid phishing scams is to remember that no organization demands your confidential data ie passwords, credit card numbers, etc.

The most important point to remember within an organization is to educate your employees about phishing attacks and ask them to follow a necessary protocol before trusting fraudulent emails and calls. This could save your company’s revenues and reputation.

Apart from human effort, another necessary step is to have a secured IT architecture for your company that keeps your company’s data safe.

After all, precaution is better than cure! And in cases of cyberattacks like phishing, having secured and error-proof cybersecurity is the best way to go!

But, what should your cybersecurity cover? And is having a cybersecurity service in place enough to save your company from cyberattacks like phishing?

Just as cyberattacks are increasing with every passing day, the services and software to protect against these attacks are getting stronger as well. All you need to do is, Use them well. Securing your company’s data and the devices that have access to this data becomes quite an impossible task if you have accurate and effective anti-phishing software and services deployed. These services should, at all times:

Encrypt and back up your data

Prevent from cyberattacks by identifying any form of malicious activity incoming on the network

Segment networks for limiting an attacker’s ability

Conduct regular security audits

Highly secure your sensitive data

Restrict admin rights

Implement Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR)

Implement multi-factor authentication

And most importantly, provide cyber security insurance.

Implementing an effective cybersecurity service for protecting your organization’s data from phishing attacks is a good place to start. But, where to start? Sharkstriker could be a good choice.

Wondering, where to find the best-managed security services to enhance your organization’s security posture against threat-posing entities? Sharktriker could be your solution. Our SOC team uses effective managed security services that detect malicious activity through continuous monitoring and comprehensive rules. Our phishing prevention module further blocks the execution of malicious activity from the grassroots level to protect your data and revenue.

Our team, who is an expert at providing and enhancing your security portfolio by our Manager Security Service, leverages MDR to detect and quarantine malicious activity. Not only this, our ORCA philosophy and SIEM services help us and allow us quick-detection and effective response to keep your company’s IT infrastructure extremely secured at all times.

Thus, it is not wrong to say that threats are increasing with each day and becoming harder and harder to distinguish. With these increasing threats comes the doom of losing a huge sum of money, employees, and most importantly, your customer's confidential data. All of these can be avoided by taking a single smart step towards your organization’s success and protection by implementing a great and effective MSSP in place, to protect your company’s data highly protected.

Remember, with just a single decision, you can save your company billions of dollars!