
4 Reasons Why Phishing Attacks Are So Popular
Phishing Explained
Phishing is one of the most common cyber attacks used to obtain sensitive information, such as login credentials and payment details from unsuspecting targets. Threat actors successfully pose as a trusted source or contact of their victim, and trick them into clicking on a malicious link or to download a spam file sent over email, text messages, phone calls or social media. If you ever fall into a phishing trap, you could end up with dangerous malware, a slow system, major data loss, among other things.
The term "phishing" is one of the most talked about subjects in today’s digital landscape, and is a priority concern for business owners and executives. It's responsible for more than 20% of all data breaches, so it's no surprise that it is so popular. Phishing attacks can be severely damaging for both individuals and businesses. While individuals can affected by illicit online purchases, financial fraud or identity theft, a company that is the victim of a phishing attack, in most cases, suffers irreparable financial losses in addition to a loss of market share, reputation damages and lost trust from investors and customers. An unfortunate reality regarding phishing is that it is becoming more sophisticated and frequent by the day!
Why are phishing attacks becoming more frequent?
The gradual rise in the Remote/Hybrid workforce model
Over the last year and a half, a significant number of organizations had to transition to remote/hybrid work models. While this switch allowed businesses to continue without much interruption, the scattered workforce and mobile endpoints brought along their own set of challenges. One of the main problems was vulnerabilities becoming more visible to hackers, who quickly exploited them through phishing attacks.
Organizational oversights and cyber gaps
Many businesses, in efforts to stay afloat amid the global crisis, completely disregarded cybersecurity. This included decreased spending on security posture, a lack of cybersecurity training for employees, and much more. Such mistakes opened the door for cybercriminals to walk right through and wreak havoc.
Constantly evolving cybercriminals
Like all criminal-geniuses, hackers are constantly striving to find loop holes and exploit any security gaps in your business. They're constantly changing their strategies, so you'll need to be prepared to defend your business against their every move. One of the new strategies that threat actors have used to target businesses is through their own website contact form; they submit a form on their page, pretending to be someone from legal authorities, requesting them to download a report because their company is not complying with the law.
Cheap phishing tools
There are inexpensive phishing tools available on the dark web, that anyone can access to become hackers, you don't even need to have any technical skills to use them.
What can businesses do to stay safe and avoid phishing attacks?
In order to avoid falling victim to phishing attacks, businesses small or large should always stay vigilant.
Here are a few pro-tips to your business should consider:
- Organize ongoing security awareness training to ensure that everyone is adequately equipped to identify cyber threats, and that they adhere to relevant security requirements.
- Verify that your IT infrastructure is regularly updated so that hackers cannot find gaps to exploit (unpatched and non-updated systems).
- Implement strong password policies and create a system that ensure that everyone follows it.
- Isolate important infrastructure components so that in the event of a cyber incident, everything doesn't crumble.
- Orchestrate simulated phishing attacks to test your employees' response.
- Deploy a phishing tool that protects your emails and end-users.
Looking for phishing protection for your GTA business? Partnering with a cyber expert like PACE Technical relieves you of additional concern and responsibility. Furthermore, taking an audit of your technology can inform you if any components of your IT have any risks that should be mitigated . To help you through the process, we have created an informative IT Assessment and report that you can ask us about here.