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How to Best Protect Against Phishing Attacks

Apr 30, 2021

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Today, it would be practically impossible to go about our daily lives without the facilities of the internet and all that it offers. The importance of the World Wide Web in the daily lives of almost 5 billion people that are constantly accessing it today has become so fundamental that it is comparable to oxygen or electricity, as it were. The internet is no longer a portal for the odd social hub, downloading MP3s or watching YouTube videos. Today, it has transformed the entire economy and the way we live. The global economy has now built a symbiotic, interdependent relationship with the internet. Incomparable to it’s early self, the amount of data moving around the internet, coupled with the amount of users that are present online at every juncture is truly mind boggling and massively underappreciated not to mention the prevalence of sensitive financial, medical and private information that we entrust the internet with.

What are the disadvantages of such an incredible communications tool that has changed the way society works? For all the wonderful connectivity, practicality and other benefits that using the internet offers everyone, there is now a substantial dark side that plagues it. This dark side has been building now for the better part of a decade, in alignment with how the internet itself advanced. What are we talking about exactly? We are talking about a few things; cybersecurity issues, and the black sheep that is widely known as cybercrime. Cybercriminals today employ a plethora of techniques for their personal gain, or in the more serious cases work for government intelligence with the aim of toppling other nations. The problem is that it is increasingly difficult for the cybersecurity sector today to create solutions for a cybercriminal force that is also increasingly more invisible, sophisticated and ruthless. The mass majority of internet incidents leading to countless billions of dollars of damage globally come in the form of data breaches. Data breaches include the following popular cybercrime methods; ransomware, malware and phishing. As far as the type of data breach that is most often talked about, and has proliferated the most concerns, these are called phishing scams. As harmless, and possibly humorous as it sounds, phishing is a widely established type of social engineering scam that has led to a lot of damage for both individuals and on the organization's end. Phishing scams are some of the most common way cybercriminals (fraudsters, not hackers) illegally gain access to confidential or sensitive information. Social engineering attacks are by far the cybercriminals chosen repertoire of tricks. Let’s look at why this is the case, what types of phishing scams exist and ultimately how to build a wall against them.

What is Social Engineering?


Social engineering scams are one of the most efficient tools in a cybercriminal’s arsenal for the simple fact that they can be executed with ease, and propagated on a massive scale for quick monetary gains. In cybersecurity terms, it is always easiest to exploit the human factor. Humans are the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain, and social engineering scams like phishing have brought the ‘con’ game into play. Social engineering leverages around the factor of human naivety, the willingness of social media users to unnecessarily share their information online and the lack of knowledge surrounding personal cybersecurity hygiene. Cybercriminals will go through three steps in order to socially engineer an attack; First, they will do the research on the target, followed by establishing contact and finally applying the attack. We will look at more information on this in the next section.

What is Phishing?


Phishing, as the name suggests, was inspired by ‘fishing’. Essentially, a cybercriminal will bait a user via a fraudulent email, text or phone communication (smishing and vishing). The point here is to get the target to click on a malicious link that appears to be from a legitimate source. This can be a fake login, or a fake website that is indistinguishable from the real thing. Alternatively, an urgent email claiming a money transfer to your account or anything suspicious like this is a phishing attempt. Once a user falls for the trick either by continuing to communicate with the fraudster or clicking on a malware link, the scam will eventually be successful or at the very least the target’s device will now be infected and compromised from that point forward.

Types of Phishing Scams


Phishing scams vary, but are fundamentally all social engineering scams that have nothing to do with direct attack cybercrime such as ransomware or DDoS attacks. Some of the type of the several phishing scams are;

These attack techniques are all considered fraudulent scams, where the end goal is to use the collected data from the scammed victim to breach protected accounts or data and from there use for purposes such as; financial gain, targeted data disruption, blackmail, mass data collection etc. Unfortunately, thousands of innocent victims are successfully targeted by phishing scams every day -which are usually conducted by massive fraud teams originating in India, China or Nigeria (among others).

How to Be Prepared For Phishing Scams


Cybersecurity is the bastion of internet defense against things like phishing scams. Whether you are an individual such as a remote worker or the CEO of a large organization, your data has already been breached several times (mostly without your knowledge). A simple way to look at this is to search for websites that will check whether your email addresses have been part of a data breach, for example. So, having good cybersecurity hygiene in place is akin to having a good doctor -essential for your survival. What do you need to do to avoid phishing scams? Here are some of the best suggestions;

  • It is critical to know who the sender of an email is, and to double check that source

  • Never click on attachments you are unsure about

  • Do not open suspicious emails (most of which should be filtered into your spam folder)

  • Browse the internet with while running a premium (not free) Virtual Private Network

  • Make use of security-oriented web browsers

  • Keep informed about new phishing techniques

  • Avoid overhsharing personal information on social media

  • Verify a website’s security certificate and encryption in the address bar

  • Keep your devices up-to-date

  • Always have your system firewall enabled

  • Make use of premium antivirus and antimalware software (avoid free software)

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