What is Phishing and How to Protect Yourself Against It?
Phishing is a cybercrime in which a target or targets are contacted by email, telephone or text message by someone posing as a legitimate institution to lure individuals into providing sensitive data such as personally identifiable information, banking and credit card details, and passwords. The information is then used to access important accounts and can result in identity theft and financial loss.
Examples of Phishing
1 .DECEPTIVE PHISHING
The most common type of phishing scam, deceptive phishing refers to any attack by which fraudsters impersonate a legitimate company and attempt to steal people’s personal information or login credentials. Those emails frequently use threats and a sense of urgency to scare users into doing the attackers’ bidding.
2. SPEAR PHISHING
Not all phishing scams lack personalization – some use it quite heavily.
For instance, in spear phishing scams, fraudsters customize their attack emails with the target’s name, position, company, work phone number and other information in an attempt to trick the recipient into believing that they have a connection with the sender.
3. CEO FRAUD
Spear phishers can target anyone in an organization, even top executives. That’s the logic behind a “whaling” attack, where fraudsters attempt to harpoon an executive and steal their login credentials.
In the event their attack proves successful, fraudsters can choose to conduct CEO fraud, the second phase of a business email compromise (BEC) scam where attackers impersonate an executive and abuse that individual’s email to authorize fraudulent wire transfers to a financial institution of their choice.
4. PHARMING
As users become more savvy to traditional phishing scams, some fraudsters are abandoning the idea of “baiting” their victims entirely. Instead, they are resorting to pharming – a method of attack which stems from domain name system (DNS) cache poisoning.
The Internet’s naming system uses DNS servers to convert alphabetical website names, such as “www.microsoft.com,” to numerical IP addresses used for locating computer services and devices.
Under a DNS cache poisoning attack, a pharmer targets a DNS server and changes the IP address associated with an alphabetical website name. That means an attacker can redirect users to a malicious website of their choice even if the victims entered in the correct website name.
To protect against pharming attacks, organizations should encourage employees to enter in login credentials only on HTTPS-protected sites. Companies should also implement anti-virus software on all corporate devices and implement virus database updates, along with security upgrades issued by a trusted Internet Service Provider (ISP), on a regular basis.
5. DROPBOX PHISHING
While some phishers no longer bait their victims, others have specialized their attack emails according to an individual company or service.
Take Dropbox, for example. Millions of people use Dropbox every day to back up, access and share their files. It’s no wonder, therefore, that attackers would try to capitalize on the platform’s popularity by targeting users with phishing emails.
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Note: Some of the information in samples on this website may have been impersonated or spoofed.