How to Prevent Spear Phishing Attacks in 2019

by Kristen White Blogger Phishing attacks have become incredibly common these days. Every hour of every day scammers are tricking email users into opening suspicious links and downloading malicious software. Most of these emails will be caught by an email filter, but some emails will slip through the cracks. 

For businesses and organizations, the threat of an attack is even greater because most work-related interactions are conducted via email. Most employees don’t have the time or the training to detect a phishing email when it lands in their inbox. If a businesses’ email security system is out of date or not advanced, attackers will take advantage of employees and they could fall prey to a phishing attack.

More than 30% of the phishing emails are opened by employees. It is an alarming number that highlights the need for having a powerful anti-phishing solution in place to protect employees from phishing attacks. Let’s take a look at the types of phishing threats businesses face.

Business Email Compromise 
Malware and Ransomware
Brand Forgery
Domain Spoofing
Whaling Attacks
CEO Fraud 
Zero Day Attacks
Spear Phishing

Some of the above threats are more common than others but one thing is true: every employee is vulnerable to spear phishing. What exactly is spear phishing? A spear phishing attack occurs when attackers impersonate a trusted person such as a colleague, a senior manager, supplier, etc. The attacker then sends emails asking for funds or to download a file. The phishing email might also ask for the user to buy a gift card or pay an invoice. If the instructions in the email are followed, the person and business are compromised. 

Spear Phishing prevention requires more than just examining the senders’ URLs and email addresses. The latest anti-phishing software uses computer vision to detect logos and determine where the emails originate from. If an email claims to be from an employee but is actually from a scammer, the software detects that the email comes from an external source and not the internal network used by employees. After detection, a banner pops up along with the email, notifying the user about the fraud.

The software uses a process known as behavioral profiling to determine the origin of an email. The software builds a profile of every employee by recording specific behavioral patterns. When an email claims to be from another employee but does not fit their pattern, an impersonation warning is sent out.

Anti-phishing software offers a phishing solution for any email system. It easily integrates into the existing framework and provides complete protection for all devices on the network. This means that employees using personal devices to conduct business are protected both at work and out of the office. No additional software is necessary for this remote protection. Employees will get the alerts that they would receive in their office and reporting them is just as easy.

Setting up the software takes mere minutes and then it’s ready to track any suspicious emails. The data collected can be accessed online with an interactive dashboard. Management and IT departments can monitor the suspicious, blocked emails and any malicious files the software quarantines. By looking at the dashboard, they can see the effectiveness of the system.  

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Created on Jul 19th 2019 05:11. Viewed 441 times.

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