Phishing Email Attacks: Examples and Solutions

1
Phishing Email Attacks Examples and Solutions

• Phishing is a type of cybersecurity attack in
  which malicious actors send messages posing as
  trustworthy people or institutions. Phishing
  messages deceive users into doing things like
  installing a malicious file, clicking on a risky
  link, or exposing critical information like
  access credentials.
• Phishing, a wide term for attempts to persuade
  or deceive computer users, is the most common
  type of social engineering technique. Social
  engineering is a rising attack vector that is
  used in almost all security incidents. Phishing
  and other social engineering attacks are
  routinely employed in combination with other
  threats such as malware, code injection, and
  network assaults.

2
Types of Phishing

• Email Phishing 
• Spear Phishing
• Whaling
• Smishing and Vishing
• Angler Phishing

3
Email Phishing 

• The majority of phishing assaults are delivered
  via email. Attackers generally establish bogus
  domain names that resemble legitimate businesses
  and send hundreds of repetitive requests to
  victims.
• Attackers may add or substitute characters
  (my-bank.com instead of mybank.com), utilize
  subdomains (ank.host.com), or use the trusted
  organization's name as the email username
  (mybank_at_host.com) to create phony domains. Many
  phishing emails induce a feeling of urgency or
  threat to persuade the recipient to act fast
  without first verifying the source or legitimacy
  of the email.

4
Spear Phishing

• Malicious emails addressed to specific people are
  examples of spear phishing. Typically, the
  attacker already possesses some or all of the
  following information on the victim
• Name
• Place of employment
• Job title
• Email address
• Specific information about their job role
• Trusted colleagues, family members, or other
  contacts, and samples of their writing
•  
• This information aids in the success of phishing
  emails and the manipulation of victims into
  undertaking tasks and activities such as money
  transfers.

5
Whaling

• Whaling assaults target top management and other
  positions of power in an organization. The
  ultimate purpose of whaling is the same as other
  forms of phishing attempts, although the approach
  is frequently quite subtle. Senior workers
  usually have a wealth of knowledge in the public
  domain, which attackers might utilize to design
  very powerful assaults.
• Typically, these assaults do not employ
  techniques such as malicious URLs and bogus
  links. Instead, they employ highly tailored
  communications based on information gleaned from
  a thorough study of the victim. Whaling
  attackers, for example, utilize fraudulent tax
  returns to get sensitive information about the
  victim and use it to design their assault.

6
Smishing and Vishing 

• This is a phishing attempt that involves a phone
  call or a text message. Smishing is the
  fraudulent transmission of SMS messages, whereas
  vishing is the fraudulent transmission of phone
  calls. 
• An attacker in a common voice phishing scam
  poses as a fraud investigator for a credit card
  firm or bank, notifying victims that their
  account has been compromised. Criminals then
  request payment card information from the victim,
  ostensibly to verify their identification or
  transfer funds to a safe account (which is
  actually the attacker's). 
• Vishing schemes may also use automated phone
  calls posing to be from a trustworthy source and
  instructing the victim to input personal
  information onto their phone keypad.

7
Angler Phishing 

• These assaults take advantage of bogus social
  media profiles associated with well-known
  organizations. The attacker uses an account
  handle that looks like a legitimate firm (for
  example, _at_pizzahutcustomercare) and the same
  profile image as the real company account.
• Attackers take advantage of consumers'
  proclivity to use social media platforms to lodge
  grievances and solicit assistance from companies.
  Instead of contacting the legitimate brand, the
  customer contacts the attacker's bogus social
  account. 
• When attackers get such a request, they may seek
  personal information from the consumer in order
  to identify the problem and respond correctly. In
  other circumstances, the attacker sends a link to
  a bogus customer service page that leads to a
  malicious website.

8
Methods to Prevent Phishing

• It is critical to teach your staff to recognize
  phishing methods, detect phishing signals, and
  report suspicious instances to the security team.
  Similarly, before dealing with a website, firms
  should urge employees to check for trust badges
  or stickers from well-known cybersecurity
  solutions or antivirus providers. This
  demonstrates that the website is concerned about
  security and is not likely to be fraudulent or
  harmful.
• Modern email filtering technologies can protect
  email communications from viruses and other
  dangerous payloads. Emails with harmful links,
  attachments, spam material, or language that
  might indicate a phishing assault can be detected
  by specific cybersecurity solutions. Email
  security solutions automatically detect and
  quarantine questionable emails, and they employ
  sandboxing technology to detonate emails to
  determine whether they contain harmful code. 
• The increased usage of cloud services and
  personal devices in the workplace has resulted in
  a plethora of new endpoints that may or may not
  be completely secured. Endpoint assaults will
  compromise certain endpoints, thus security teams
  must prepare for this possibility. Monitoring
  endpoints for security risks and implementing
  timely cleanup and response on compromised
  devices are critical.
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