Not all Phishing attack types can be protected using software solutions

by | Sep 30, 2021 | Facts

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Fact: Not all Phishing attack types can be protected using software solutions

There are different phishing attack types and often people classify them all under one category, which is not the case in the real world.

We will focus on Spear-Phishing Attacks vs Normal Phishing attacks to highlight their importance and how software is not enough to block such attacks, due to the ways there are in Offensive Security which can bypass any type of rules set, using advanced spoofing and a targeted approach.

Spear-Phishing Attack is the most successful form of acquiring confidential information on the internet, accounting for 91% of attacks.

Spear-phishing is a targeted attempt to steal sensitive information such as account credentials or financial information from a specific victim, often for malicious reasons. This is achieved by acquiring personal details on the victim such as their friends, hometown, employer, locations they frequent, and what they have recently bought online. The attackers then disguise themselves as trustworthy friends or entities to acquire sensitive information, typically through email or other online messaging.

Phishing attacks are not personalized to their victims and are usually sent to masses of people at the same time. The goal of phishing attacks is to send a spoofed email that looks as if it is from an authentic organization to a large number of people, banking on the chances that someone will click on that link and provide their personal information or download malware. Poor Spoofing techniques are used and often are easy to identify from the sender’s email address.

Spear-phishing attacks target a specific victim, and messages are modified to specifically address that victim, purportedly coming from an entity that they are familiar with and containing personal information. Spear-phishing requires more thought and time to achieve than phishing. Spear-phishing attackers try to obtain as much personal information about their victims as possible to make the emails that they send look legitimate and to increase their chance of fooling recipients. Because of the personal level of these emails, it is more difficult to identify spear-phishing attacks than to identify phishing attacks conducted.

Some tips to avoid spear-phishing attacks, which goes beyond relying on hardware, software, and security measures that could save you from a serious breach:

⦿ Educate employee’s responses to them because solutions implemented alone cannot block them. Especially if they are crafted using sophisticated techniques like spoofing & bypassing SPF, DKIM, DMARC measures.

⦿ Watch what personal information you post on the internet: Look at your online profiles. How much personal information is available for potential attackers to view and remove the ones that provide sensitive information that is not needed.

⦿ Use logic when opening emails: If you get an email from a “friend” asking for personal information including your password, carefully check to see if their email address is one that you have seen them use in the past. Real businesses will not send you an email asking for your username or password.

⦿ Implement a data protection program at your organization that combines user education around data security best practices that will help prevent data loss due to spear-phishing attacks. Request for advanced phishing attack simulation against employees frequently and not the generic ones that get generated with easy to identify attacks. For midsize to larger corporations, data loss prevention software should be installed to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access or egress, even if a user falls for a phishing scam.

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