What is Phishing?

In recent years, the focus by corporations and governments to reduce Spam has led to significant reductions in the volume of Spam sent. However, interestingly, where the incidence of Spam mail is on the decline, phishing attacks are increasing. This is due to the comparative returns that hackers can get from phishing as opposed to pure Spam.

Unfortunately, where it once used to be easy to identify a phishing email due to its suspicious subject line, its poor structure and grammar and its request for money or personal information, today it is much harder to distinguish phishing emails from legitimate emails. The once traditional phishing definition – the sending of unsolicited emails to recipients in an attempt to get them to pass over personal and sensitive financial information that can be used by the hacker for maligned purposes – is no longer broad enough to describe the newly evolved nature of phishing schemes. To accurately define phishing it is important that the newer practice of spear phishing be included in the definition.

Spear Phishing - Targeted attacks

Spear phishing seeks to target a specific organisation and gain access to confidential data. Most recently Sony, the International Monetary Fund and SecureID have been victims of elaborate Spear phishing attacks, where the personal and financial details of their customers have been stolen.

More often than not, Spear phishing is successful due to company employees unwittingly giving access to a hacker. Hackers start by sending an email to employees within the target organisation. The email however, is likely to be written and designed in such a way that it appears to have come from a source the recipient would trust (read our blog on some of the most common Phishing subject lines). The email will also contain just enough information to make it seem like it has come from the actual company the email is impersonating. All it takes is one employee to act upon the email and go to the site supplied in the email and spyware or other Malware may be installed on the victims computer, rendering them open to penetration by the hacker.

Block Phishing with EnBox

Fortunately, EnBox’s enterprise grade solution works to protect your email network by scanning all incoming email, performing checks against the sender, the email itself, all links embedded within the email and by quarantining any emails found to be of a suspicious nature. This prevents them from even making it onto your network and significantly reduces the likelihood you will become a target of a spear phishing scam.

With hackers increasingly targeting small and medium sized businesses, the question you need to answer when designing your network security is; what measures have you got to protect yourself from email phishing scams? If you are looking for the best phishing protection and ways to eliminate phishing scams, Contact EnBox staff to understand how to better protect your business and your personal information from hackers!