How can phishing be eliminated

While phishing can be a difficult area to tackle at times, by following the simple tips and advice outlined in this article and embracing proper phishing prevention tools — you can greatly minimize your risk of falling victim to digital scammers. If you are in need of a full internet security package try Kaspersky Total Security. We use cookies to make your experience of our websites better.

By using and further navigating this website you accept this. Detailed information about the use of cookies on this website is available by clicking on more information. Am I at risk of being a phishing target? What types of phishing scams exist? How do I spot a phishing scam? What is phishing email? What should I do to avoid being a victim of phishing? What is Phishing? The most common scenario is as follows: You open your email and suddenly an alert from your bank appears in your inbox.

When you click the link in the email, you are taken to a webpage that looks, more or less, like your bank. The alert will say there is a problem with your account and ask you to confirm your login and password. After entering your credentials on the page that appears, you are usually sent to the actual institution to enter your information a second time.

By steering you to the legitimate institution, you don't immediately realize your information was stolen. How does Phishing work? Who is at risk of Phishing attacks? Spam Phishing Spam phishing is a broad net being thrown to catch any unsuspecting person. Phishing spam messages are sent out in mass quantities by spammers and cybercriminals that are looking to do one or more of the following: Make money from the small percentage of recipients that respond to the message. Run phishing scams — in order to obtain passwords, credit card numbers, bank account details and more.

Targeted Phishing Targeted phishing attacks usually refers to spear phishing or it most common variant, whaling. Phishers might take this information from: Social media profiles Existing data breaches Other publicly discoverable info Moving in for an actual attack might be swift with an immediate attempt to encourage you to take an action. What types of Phishing Scams should I know about? Regardless of how they are targeted, phishing attacks take many roads to get to you and most people are likely to experience at least one of these forms of phishing : Phishing email appears in your email inbox — usually with a request to follow a link, send a payment, reply with private info, or open an attachment.

Domain spoofing is a popular way an email phisher might mimic valid email addresses. Voice phishing vishing scammers call you and impersonate a valid person or company to deceive you. They might redirect you from an automated message and mask their phone number. Vishers will try to keep you on the phone and urge you to take action. SMS phishing smishing similarly to vishing, this scheme will imitate a valid organization, using urgency in a short text message to fool you. Mobile messaging services are also at risk of this.

Social media phishing involves criminals using posts or direct messages to persuade you into a trap. Clone phishing duplicates a real message that was sent previously, with legitimate attachments and links replaced with malicious ones. This appears in email but may also show up in other means like fake social media accounts and text messages. In other cases, legitimate websites might be manipulated or imitated via: Watering hole phishing targets popular sites that many people visit.

An attack like this might try to exploit weaknesses in a site for any number of other phishing attacks. Delivering malware, link redirection, and other means are common in these schemes. Pharming DNS cache poisoning uses malware or an onsite vulnerability to reroute traffic from safe websites to phishing sites.

Manually typing a URL will still lead visitors to the malicious site if it is a victim of pharming. For example, a website might be created that is one letter off from a valid one. These will grab user login credentials and anything else you might enter on the otherwise safe site. Tabnabbing happens when an unattended fraudulent page reloads into an imitation of a valid site login. When you return to it, you might believe it to be real and unknowingly hand over access to your account.

While this encryption sign used to be exclusive to sites that were verified as safe, now any site can get this. Even your actual internet connection can be compromised by: Evil twin attacks mimic official public Wi-Fi at locations like coffee shops and airports. This is done in efforts to get you to connect and eavesdrop on all your online activity. Finally, here are some more types of phishing you should be aware of: Search engine results phishing uses methods to get a fraudulent webpage to appear in search results before a legitimate one.

Angler phishing impersonates a customer service representative for a real company to trick you out of information. This can include CEO impersonation or pretending a vendor with a fake invoice to initiate activities like wire transfers. Cryptocurrency phishing targets those with cryptocurrency wallets. Instead of using long-term means to mine cryptocurrency themselves, these criminals try to steal from those that already have these funds.

Some examples of common phishing scams Whilst it would be impractical and impossible to list every known phishing scam here, there are some more common ones you should definitely look out for: Iran Cyberattack phishing scams use an illegitimate Microsoft email, prompting a login to restore your data in attempts to steal your Microsoft credentials. If you receive one of these emails, this is what you should do: Verify the sender by checking their email address — WHO sender addresses use the person who.

NOT Gmail, etc. Do not rush or panic react — scammers use this in order to pressure you into clicking links or opening attachments. Change your passwords and contact your bank immediately.

Phishing Emails: How to recognize and avoid a Phishing Email Spotting a phishing email comes down to pointing out anything inconsistent or unusual. What does a Phishing Email look like? This figure increased more than tenfold in the last five years, up from 19, in Despite improvements made to email filters throughout the years — Google filters out million spam emails per day for Gmail users — phishing attacks are still popular for two reasons:.

The 0. The majority of phishing attacks are delivered via email. The attacker most likely gets their hand on a list of breached emails and sends phishing emails in bulk, expecting to trick at least a fraction of the list. Depending on how far the attacker went with the fake website, he might also grab additional information necessary for identity theft.

Other than the generic phishing campaigns, there are other kinds of phishing attacks that you should also be aware of. Most phishing attacks happen due to the law of averages — if you have a big enough list, you are bound to hit some exactly when they are distracted with colleagues, or under pressure to meet some deadline, etc. However, sometimes attackers will specifically target individuals in which it pays to spend time personalizing the message. Attacks aimed at one person are known as spear phishing, concerning the activity of fishing with a spear instead of fishing with a wider net.

A step beyond spear-phishing, whaling is a special type of spear-phishing attack where the fraudster targets high-profile individuals, such as the CEO in the private sector or high-ranking government officials in the public sector.

Whaling attacks will often try to get a subordinate of the victim to perform an action; the FBI report shows that criminals will often try to gain control of the CFO or CEO and request wires to fraudulent accounts. Spoofing is a kind of attack where the attacker pretends to be someone else to manipulate the victim. Most phishing attacks use spoofing as a social engineering tool, but not all spoofing attacks are phishing.

For example, spoofing attacks are also used as attack vectors for ransomware attacks. In a typical ransomware attack, the victim receives an email with a compromised attachment containing malware that, upon execution, encrypts their computer files.

According to the same FBI report, the most frequent target of fraudsters is people over 60 years old, totaling , attacks in In terms of victim loss, the report found that the most frequent type of attack was to businesses that generally work with suppliers and partners abroad and are used to making large money transfers.

This is three times as much as profitable as the second type of attack: those pretending to be close family or friends requesting money. The third most profitable were discussing investments, where the fraudster convinces a victim to invest in fake opportunities.

Instead, the brain looks for patterns to make the decision-making process faster, but in doing so, introduces a few blind spots that can be exploited by an attentive fraudster.

Take, for instance, the truth bias. Our default behavior is to believe people are telling the truth unless we have very good evidence to think otherwise. This means that, particularly for outbound encrypted traffic, relying on scanning standard ports is not enough. Solutions deployed need to scan and decrypt outgoing traffic on non-standard ports. This is imperative in order to halt the obfuscation and exfiltration of critical data. But that inspection must include the ability to intelligently bypass decrypting encrypted traffic that contains sensitive user information, such as financial or health-related information.

There are also other key things to consider, as well, such as the type of encryption supported by devices in the security stack. For instance, if an attacker knows that a certain security device is unable to support forward secrecy also known as perfect forward secrecy, or PFS , they may leverage it so that the encrypted traffic is simply passed through by the security device.

This action is especially costly and dangerous in environments where security devices in the stack are daisy chained together. Then, attackers make victims feel pressured to act; for example, they may claim a bill has been overdue for months or that they expected to receive a.

Using a medium that regularly delivers people an exorbitant amount of information and requests to act, attackers and banking on the fact that we do not often question the legitimacy of the requests we receive, especially when it looks and sounds the part. When done right, most victims may never even realize they have been attacked.

Over time, companies have paid more attention to phishing, implementing stricter security to prevent attacks, and email providers have gotten better at automatically classifying these kinds of attacks as spam. Although these practices have minimized many phishing attempts, they have also prompted attackers to get smarter. Each differs by either mode of attack or victim type:. On top of that, phishing techniques are repeatable in multiple vectors. If an attacker finds out that email is already relatively secure at an organization, they can switch to a different medium or even target the victims over their personal accounts.

When attackers play their cards right, they can use phishing to wreak havoc within an organization. Even employees at Facebook and Google have fallen for phishing.

From to , both companies succumbed to a phishing campaign centered around a third-party vendor, Quanta. While those attacks were destructive, other phishing attacks have been worse, exposing precious IP or even customer data. For instance, in , Sony suffered from an egregious spearphishing attack.

After attackers researched employee names and titles on LinkedIn, they pretended to be colleagues and sent employees emails containing malware.

Although phishing dates back to the s, it is still used in full force today. Attackers default to phishing attacks simply because they work. In fact, phishing attacks have gotten even more pervasive during the pandemic. This is a big concern for security professionals everywhere.