What Is Phishing: How to Prevent Advanced Email Attacks

Most employees are required to take security awareness training during their first week of work. Normally these courses outline company policies, talk about the importance of online security, and share examples of scams so that employees can detect and report them in the future. And yet, how many times do employees, and even leadership, fall for email phishing tests?

The answer is probably far too high. No matter how much education you provide, a compelling phishing scam can deceive even the most savvy of your employees. One employee’s misstep could expose sensitive personal information to a malicious party. This piece will help you understand the nuances of phishing and provide you useful tips to combat the shrewd techniques of scammers.

Phishing is a cyberattack in which a target receives a fraudulent email or text designed to prompt them to share sensitive information such as banking details or login credentials. Attackers typically impersonate legitimate institutions like governments or large corporations to convince individuals to relinquish the data.

Many people have the perception that phishing scams are obvious and thus easily avoidable. Yet, phishing attacks occur successfully every day, multiple times per day. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center discovered that victims lost $57 million to phishing schemes in 2019 alone, and estimates that phishing costs United States businesses close to $5 billion per year.

2023 Gartner® Market Guide

This guide gives email security leaders exclusive Gartner research on the industry to ensure their existing threat solution remains appropriate for the changing landscape of evolved phishing attacks. In this guide:

Key findings and recommendations from Gartner
Evaluate native capabilities of cloud email systems
Representative Vendors for email security and tools
Learn about the market direction of email security

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The Evolution of Phishing

The expression “phishing” was first used in the 1990s to describe attempts to gain access to AOL usernames and passwords. Users weren’t familiar with this kind of attack, and many fell prey to phishing even when AOL cautioned users about the danger phishing presented.

Since then, attackers have become even more sophisticated and prolific. In response, companies have adopted powerful gateway-level email security and phishing tools. But attackers have not backed off, creating new methods such as phishing websites that spoof popular domains to attempt to collect sensitive data.

The sheer number of phishing sites and the tight timeline security teams have to warn people about them, make phishing attacks extremely difficult problems to address.

Today, more than 1.5 million new phishing sites get created per month, and the sites only stay active for 4 to 8 hours on average. And, unfortunately, rule-based email security tools don’t have the visual anomalydetection features to uncover fake login pages in real-time.

Tips to Prevent Phishing

Phishing attacks compromise employee and customer data, and, ultimately, cost you money.
The good news is that there are ways to reduce your organization’s vulnerability to attacks. Here are a few:

1. Employee Education

Education increases the likelihood employees will discern attacks and report them to company security teams before surrendering any information. If you don’t already, instruct your employees to hover over links to check for a Secure Socket Layer certificate, force them to regularly change their passwords, and encourage them to set unique passwords for each application they use.

Besides these common safety measures, continuously update your employees on new tactics scammers are using to add an extra layer of protection to your business.

2. MFA/2FA

Multi-factor or two-factor authentication—MFA and 2FA, respectively—are standard phishing protection for any modern business. When logging into a workplace application, MFA and 2FA require employees to provide their password and one or more codes sent via text or authenticator app to add an extra level of defense around sensitive information.

3. API Mailbox-level Intelligence

To detect malicious emails with and without payloads, the technology must have the capacity to dynamically learn mailbox and communication habits too. This will allow for the detection of anomalies based on both email content and metadata and thereby improve trust and authentication of email communications, flagging and quarantining any threats in real time.

4. AI-powered Incident Response

Many organizations have to manually sift through emails and triage attacks one-by-one, but relying on humans to find and investigate each attack leaves a lot of room for error. Artificial intelligence can dramatically speed up this process by automatically surfacing, analyzing, and even responding to attacks, freeing up your resources to work on other pressing projects.

Combat Phishing With
Anti-Phishing Software

With phishing getting more advanced by the day, businesses need a way to stay ahead of the attackers to avoid compromising their information security. Anti-phishing software can be an extremely valuable asset to aid in detecting and removing phishing attempts. IRONSCALES is a self-learning email security platform that provides all the tools necessary to keep a business safe from evolving phishing threats.

Try a free trial of IRONSCALES to see how you can keep your business safe from phishing.

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