Technological innovations are evolving; however, fraudulent activities are equally coping with them. With fraudsters on the rise, ‘Phishing’ is the most common type of scam people have recently faced.
What is ‘Phishing’?
‘Phishing’ is a scam where an attacker impersonates to be from a reputable identity or source through emails, phone calls, texts, or other communication modes.
Through phishing, the ‘phishermen’ used to exploit personal information by creating a robust human interaction, fooling people with a web of tricks and making them fall prey to fraudulent activities.
How do phishermen act?
The person performing fraudulent activities uses people’s sympathies or convincing tricks and gets the required information. To connect with people, scammers mostly opt for malicious websites or emails as baits to deceive people into extracting their information or use malicious software to capture sensitive data from the person or an organization. Here are some of the most prominent information caught from people:
Usernames
Passwords
Contact details
Personal questions and answers
Social Security Numbers (SSNs)
Bank or credit card details
Customer names, emails, passwords, addresses, phone numbers, etc.
Why do companies need to evade phishing?
Financial loss: The fraudsters usually target the financial accounts using ransomware attacks leading to money plundering from businesses.
Data leaks/breaches: Data breaches cost heavily on a business, as they lose important data, leading to regulatory fines, damaged equipment, etc.
Spoiling brand reputation: When a company has been exposed to cyber attacks, it will lose its brand identity with the incapability of maintaining a loyal customer base and garner a negative impact on attracting new customers.
How to safeguard your business against phishing?
Protecting your businesses against cyber criminal attacks is the need of the hour. Ensuring proper software authentications and educating workers about security threats could positively impact your business. In addition, look at some of the best practices that do not allow you to be victimized.
Beware of unwanted links: One of the crucial factors is to start teaching employees about recognizing scams through form fill-up through phones, fake websites and emails. Also, check on links or URLs before clicking on them, as they may be fraudulent even if they look authentic.
Cautious of direct contact: Scammers use direct social interactions as one of their weapons for phishing. They contact the people directly and ask for some information or OTPs by provoking the person’s desires, getting the credentials/bank statements, and exploiting them efficiently. So, it’s essential to be aware of the interactions and not share sensitive information.
Maintain good password practices: Follow specific regulations in changing passwords. For example, never use more accessible passwords, i.e., ABCD123, names, date of birth, etc. Also, should avoid replication of passwords for multiple accounts and follow the procedure of changing the passwords frequently.
Entertain secondary authentication: Second-step verification/authentication through SMS, emails, authentication apps, or hardware tokens will help prevent scams.
With dedicated managed services in play, you can easily avoid phishing threats inside your business. Also, you can rely on third-party vendors to protect your digital resources as they can provide a higher up-time and 24/7 support, reducing your workload considerably.
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