Safeguarding Yourself From Phishing Attacks

By Author: Alice Coope
Total Articles: 213
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IT security is one of the major concerns amidst multiple organizations and businesses. With all the technological advancements and innovative applications, internet still is vulnerable to vicious attacks. In addition to that, the social engineering attacks today have heightened the rate of third party attacks to internet security. One of the common threats faced by most internet users today takes place in the form of phishing attacks. These attacks are highly prevalent in security and surveillance sectors, financial companies as well as IT security brands.

What is a phishing attack?

A phishing attack is generally an outcome of social engineering attempts and is crafted in a way to rob the internet user of his private data. Phishing emails are designed in sophisticated ways to make the readers believe that it originates from an authentic source and requests for personal details such as email id, passport number, bank account number, credit card details and the like. Sometimes these mails come with few links that leads the reader to fictitious websites that involves fraudulent activities. The language used ...
... by these mails are compelling and luring, that would compel the user to part with his private data and this is where users need to exercise ample control and adopt apt security measures.

Losses resulting from Phishing attacks

Data security is not the only loss that results from phishing. There are other losses too that organizations encounter. Data leakage resulting from phishing attacks leads to huge amount of revenue loss as well as brand erosion for a company. The company might find it difficult to retrieve back its past reputation and recover the losses. Furthermore, few vicious spear phishing attacks might result in damaging a computing device and remediation might take immense time. This in turn results in loss of man hours in working and leads to minimized product. It is always not possible to identify a phishing mail the first time. For this a company needs to resort to efficient phishing protection tactics to secure its employees.

Using Anti-Phishing Solutions

Today eminent IT brands have introduced advanced anti-phishing tools in the market to combat phishing. It is accessible in the form of an automated device that needs to be installed internally in an enterprise where the process, people and technology data is updated in it beforehand. After this customized phishing attacks are set up to test the level of awareness of the employees and other target audience. The solution keeps a track of the response generated and creates a detailed report based on the same. Furthermore, the solution offer statistics on user behavior and evaluates the security awareness percentage amongst the target audience. In addition to that it identified data leakage and estimates Data Loss Programs and reviews the incident response program.

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