Phishing

Phishing swindles are attempts by scammers to trick you into giving out personal information such as your bank account numbers, passwords and credit card numbers etc.

The 5 most common types of phishing attacks

Although the crooks’ ultimate goal is always the same, they’ve found many ways to launch their attack. Here are some of the most common ways in which they target people.

1. Email phishing

Most phishing attacks are sent by email. The crook will register a fake domain that mimics a genuine organization and sends thousands out thousands of generic requests. The fake domain often involves character substitution, like using ‘r’ and ‘n’ next to each other to create ‘rn’ instead of ‘m’.

Alternatively, they might use the organization’s name in the local part of the email address (such as paypal@domainregistrar.com) in the hopes that the sender’s name will simply appear as ‘PayPal’ in the recipient’s inbox.

There are many ways to spot a phishing email, but as a general rule, you should always check the email address of a message that asks you to click a link or download a attachment.

2. Spear phishing

There are two other, more sophisticated, types of phishing involving email. The first, spear phishing, describes malicious emails sent to a specific person. Criminals who do this will already have some or all of the following information about the victim:

·      Their name;

·      Place of employment;

·      Job title;

·      Email address; and

·      Specific information about their job role.

One of the most famous data breaches in recent history, the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, was done with the help of spear phishing.

The first attack sent emails containing malicious attachments to more than 1,000 email addresses. Its success led to another campaign that tricked members of the committee into sharing their passwords.

3. Whaling

Whaling attacks are even more targeted, taking aim at senior executives. Although the end goal of whaling is the same as any other kind of phishing attack, the technique tends to be a lot subtler. Tricks such as fake links and malicious URLs aren’t useful in this instance, as criminals are attempting to imitate senior staff.

Scams involving bogus tax returns are an increasingly common variety of whaling. Tax forms are highly valued by criminals as they contain a host of useful information: names, addresses, Social Security numbers and bank account information.

4. Smishing and vishing

With both smishing and vishing, telephones replace emails as the method of communication. Smishing involves criminals sending text messages (the content of which is much the same as with email phishing), and vishing involves a telephone conversation.

A common vishing scam involves a criminal posing as a fraud investigator (either from the card company or the bank) telling the victim that their account has been breached.

The criminal will then ask the victim to provide payment card details to verify their identity or to transfer money into a ‘secure’ account – by which they mean the criminal’s account.

5. Angler phishing

A relatively new attack vector, social media offers a number of ways for criminals to trick people. Fake URLs; cloned websites, posts, and tweets; and instant messaging (which is essentially the same as smishing) can all be used to persuade people to divulge sensitive information or download malware.

Alternatively, criminals can use the data that people willingly post on social media to create highly targeted attacks.

In 2016, thousands of Facebook users received messages telling them they’d been mentioned in a post. The message had been initiated by criminals and unleashed a two-stage attack. The first stage downloaded a Trojan containing a malicious Chrome browser extension on to the user’s computer.

When the user next logged in to Facebook using the compromised browser, the criminal was able to hijack the user’s account. They were able to change privacy settings, steal data and spread the infection through the victim’s Facebook friends.

Your employees are your last line of defence

Organizations can mitigate the risk of phishing with technological means, such as spam filters, but these have consistently proven to be unreliable.

Malicious emails will still get through regularly, and when that happens, the only thing preventing your organization from a breach is your employees’ ability to detect their fraudulent nature and respond appropriately.

The best way to learn to spot phishing emails is to study examples captured in the wild! And lastly, before taking any action to those e-mails, always check the senders in detail, if you know the person, call them through their official phone numbers and confirm.