Learning To Discern Phishing Mails

By Author: Alice Coope
Total Articles: 213
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Following the definition that Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has on phishing, is that it is a criminal act where phishers make use of sophisticated social engineering modes to send pop up mails to random users. This mail seems to come from authentic sources such a financial institution or any eminent FMCG brand or even internet service providers such as MSN or Yahoo. The mail contents very luring and compelling that asks you to share your private data in terms of password, bank account details from where other crucial details can be fetched out. In order to ensure participation, some phishing mails write of dire consequences if you do not share your private information. Examples of this come in the form of astrological predictions from a fictitious source or lottery mails where you are lured to win the amount.

Thus in a nutshell, phishing is all about third party intruders getting your private data so that they can hack your system and carry out fraudulent activities. Hence, there is need for proper phishing awareness programs.

Ways for Phishing Protection

There are numerous ways to attain protection from phishing ...
... Some of the simple ways are when you receive a fraudulent mail with pop ups refrain from answering it. Furthermore, it is advised never to click on any message or URL link that seems unfamiliar to you even if the source seems authentic. It is essential that you know that no original company would ask you of your private details over an email.

Today security breaches have been many and that has given rise to enterprise spear phishing. Therefore, it is important that companies opt in for high end means to protect their employees from these attacks. In this regard, people controls are essential as majority of phishing attacks are aimed at the naïve and unaware users. Simultaneously, there needs to be a process control and technology that needs to be deployed.

Anti-Phishing Solutions at work

Today numerous companies have come up with advanced anti-phishing tools. There have been certain standard solutions that only targeted the process and technology aspect of the security. These advanced solutions address the “people’s risk” part of it also. The greatest trend so far is the incident-based reactive approach that has been taken for phishing. Enterprises today lack efficient anti-phishing solution when they have to protect their employees from phishing attacks.

Top notch service providers of anti-phishing solution enable organizations to secure their critical assets, i.e. their employees from being targeted by the phishers. The solutions helps to educate the employees and help them in identifying phishing attacks that use sophisticated and complex means to appear genuine mails. Furthermore, it also reviews and assesses the user response and comes up with a proper action against phishing activities.

Read Also On: Anti Phishing Tools, Simulated Phishing Attack