Phishing Training: 5 Things Your Employees Should Be Aware Of
Do you know the cybersecurity awareness among your employees can save your business? How? As you already know, 60% of the total workforce is working from their homes – making their servers vulnerable to cyber-attacks.
Security breaches could not only lead to the leak of sensitive data but also taint the market reputation of the business- as nobody wants to partner up with the company who failed to protect their data. In a nutshell, you cannot bear the burden of protecting your company alone with only a few software and CISSP professionals.
You need more- you need your employees! As no security solutions can guarantee 100% protection from the cyber breaches, educating your employees about malicious activities like phishing will add another layer of protection to prevent cyber breaches.
Why educate about phishing?
Not long ago, phishing was aimed at the consumer market, but with time this malware is one of the biggest threats to organizations regardless of their size and the industry they serve in. Today, phishing rank as one of the most dangerous social attacks that can destroy your business in the matter of a few minutes. Responsible for 90 per cent of the total cyber breaches, phishing has become more sophisticated than ever, and now there are dozens of techniques hackers use to trick your employees and get their hands on the most critical information.
Five things your employees should understand about phishing
What is phishing?
Phishing is one of the most common types of cyber frauds where a hacker impersonates a legitimate brand to gather personal information and crucial credentials by sending an email with a malicious website.
A typical example of phishing is the office 365 attack, where a hacker sends an email that appears to come from Microsoft asking users to log into their account. When users click on the attached links, it takes them to a fake page where users harvest their credentials. Exploiting both logo and branding of Microsoft, hackers used to obtain the control of several Microsoft accounts, and the worst thing is many untrained employees cannot differentiate between a real and phishing email from Microsoft. That’s why training your employees about cybersecurity is so vital for the organization’s security.
Emails addresses can be spoofed
The first rule to protect yourself against the phishing attack is- never trust an email that is sent by the purported sender. Cybercriminals are getting smarter with methods to disguise their email addresses. They know how to trick their victims into thinking the sender is legitimate when the email is coming from a malicious source. Some of the most common types of spoofing are displaying similar fake name or cousin domains.
More than 60% of the users open the email on their smartphone and often don’t even bother to confirm the address. Phishers are aware of the fact that most of the mobile users do not expand the sender’s name to check the email address. Therefore, that takes a cousin domain to trick the users. For instance, to imitate an apple email, the hacker might use Apple.co. As the difference between the real domain and cousin domain is only “M” mobile users will not pay attention to it.
Pay attention to enticing and threatening email subject
To grab the attention of their targets, cyber criminals use headings like “free iPhone for the first 50 respondents” or, “your debit/Credit card will be blocked”. Heading like these evoke panic, urgency or excitement and users immediately answer without sparing the second thought about phishing. As people react faster to emails that involve financial gain or personal financial loss.
Phishing attacks are personalized
In the past, cybercriminals used to send phishing email in bulk, creating an impersonal impression on the receivers. Emails that address the employee with casual terms like “client”, “Customer”, or “employee” are the spam one because organizations address employees professionally. However, cyber-hackers have become smarter, and now instead of sending bulk emails, the attackers have started to customize phishing emails with the name and personal information to make it appear legitimate.
Related Post: Benefits Of CISSP To Boost Your Cyber Security Career
Links can be deceiving
All the phishing emails contain links, but the location of the links is not always the same. People are getting smarter, and so are hackers. Hence, rather than placing the malicious links in the body of the email, the hackers have started to place them in the attachments such as a PDF or word doc. And because the sandboxing technology will check the attachments for malware not links the emails look clean.
Don’t let your business fall prey to cyber breaches. Educate your employees with the best CISSP certification and training course, so they can provide greater protection to your organization than just reporting phishing attacks. You don’t require an IT degree to deal with cyber threats; instead, you only need the right instructor to train you about cyber threats. Here ProICT Training comes into the picture.
We offer a range of cyber security training courses to educate aspirants and employees about cyber security threats and breaches. If you want to learn more about cyber security then, visit the website today!
Leave a Reply