Phishing prevention has become increasingly important as thieves turn to internet frauds to steal your personal information. We’ve learned to avoid spam emails, but phishing emails can appear deceptively credible. Some are even tailored just for you. Because you will almost certainly be subjected to a phishing attempt at some point, you must be aware of the warning signs. Because frauds are nothing new on the internet, phishing is more difficult to detect than you may expect.

Phishing attempts have lured unwary victims across the internet into providing bank information, social security numbers, and other sensitive information. In addition, cybercriminals’ disguises have gotten increasingly sophisticated. Scammers can sometimes hide behind voices you recognize and trust, such as coworkers, banks, or even the government. If you so much as click a link, you could be the scammer’s next victim.

What is Phishing?

Phishing is a deceptive practice in which an attacker impersonates a legitimate entity or person via an email or other form of contact. Phishing emails are widely used by attackers to deliver malicious links or files capable of extracting login credentials, account numbers, and other personal information from victims.

Deceptive phishing is a common cybercrime because it is far easier to deceive someone into clicking on a harmful link in a seemingly legitimate phishing email than it is to breach a computer’s defenses. Learning more about phishing is essential for helping users detect and prevent it.

Phishing is a type of social engineering and cybersecurity assault in which the attacker impersonates another individual using email or other electronic communication techniques, such as social networks and Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging, to get sensitive information.

Phishers can acquire the victim’s personal information, employment history, interests, and activities from publicly available sources such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. These resources are frequently used to gather information about potential victims, such as their names, job titles, and emails. An attacker can then utilize the information to create a convincing phishing email.

Typically, a victim receives a message that appears to have come from a known contact or organization. The assault is then carried out when the victim clicks on a malicious file attachment or a hyperlink that takes them to a malicious website. In either situation, the attacker’s goal is to put malware on the user’s device or redirect them to a fraudulent website. Fake websites are designed to deceive people into disclosing personal and financial information, such as passwords, account IDs, or credit card numbers.

Although many phishing emails are poorly worded and blatantly fraudulent, fraudsters are utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) tools like chatbots to make phishing assaults appear more authentic.

Other phishing efforts might be done over the phone, in which the attacker acts as an employee and asks for personal information. These communications may include an AI-generated voice of the victim’s manager or other authoritative figure to further confuse the victim.

How to Recognize a Phishing Attack Email

Identifying a phishing email involves pointing out anything contradictory or unexpected. It can be tough to tell the difference between a genuine message and a phishing attempt. First, you should calm down before opening any links, attachments, or emailing a response.

Here’s an example of how to respond if you receive a suspicious email:

You receive a courteous email requesting a donation for the victims of the most recent hurricane to hit land. The sender’s domain is “help@ushurricanesurvivors.net,” and while the organization may be authentic, you have not heard of it.

Normally, your spam folder protects you from these kinds of emails, but for some reason, this one is sitting at the top of your inbox. You are computer aware, and you are wary of any email from an organization requesting personal and financial information. This is especially true if you did not request it and cannot confirm its identity.

Read Also: What is Zero Trust Security?

You’ve made a crucial step toward self-protection by pausing rather than acting immediately. However, you must still decide whether this is authentic or a hoax. To make an informed selection, you must first understand what to look for in a phishing email.

One of the reasons phishing emails are so sinister — and unfortunately often successful — is that they’re crafted to look legitimate. Generally, the following features are common among phishing emails and should raise red flags:

• Attachments or links
• Spelling errors
• Poor grammar
• Unprofessional graphics
• Unnecessary urgency about verifying your email address or other personal information immediately
• Generic greetings like “Dear Customer” instead of your name.

Hackers often rush to get phishing sites up, so some of them will look significantly different from the original company. You can use these traits to pick a malicious email out of your inbox.

Still, it’s not always clear what steps to take when you receive a phishing email that has skirted around your spam folder.

What are the Different Types of Phishing Attacks?

Cybercriminals continue to improve their phishing skills and develop new sorts of phishing scams. Common phishing scams include the following:

• Spear phishing attacks are directed at specific individuals or companies. These attacks usually employ gathered information specific to the victim to more successfully represent the message as being authentic. Spear phishing emails might include references to co-workers or executives at the victim’s organization, as well as the use of the victim’s name, location or other personal information.
• Whaling attacks are a type of spear phishing attack that specifically target senior executives within an organization with the objective of stealing large sums of sensitive data. Attackers research their victims in detail to create a more genuine message, as using information relevant or specific to a target increases the chances of the attack being successful. Because a typical whaling attack targets an employee who can authorize payments, the phishing message often appears to be a command from an executive to authorize a large payment to a vendor when, in fact, the payment would be made to the attackers.
• Pharming is a type of phishing attack that uses domain name system cache poisoning to redirect users from a legitimate website to a fraudulent one. Pharming attempts to trick users into logging in to the fake website using their personal credentials.
• Clone phishing attacks use previously delivered but legitimate emails that contain either a link or an attachment. Attackers make a copy — or clone — of the legitimate email and replace links or attached files with malicious ones. Victims are often tricked into clicking on the malicious link or opening the malicious attachment. This technique is often used by attackers who have taken control of another victim’s system. In this case, the attackers use their control of one system within an organization to email messages from a trusted sender who is known to the victims.
• Evil twin attacks occur when hackers try to trick users into connecting to a fake Wi-Fi network that looks like a legitimate access point. The attackers create a duplicate hotspot that sends out its own radio signal and uses the same name as the real network. When the victim connects to the evil twin network, attackers gain access to all transmissions to or from the victim’s devices, including user IDs and passwords. Attackers can also use this vector to target victim devices with their own fraudulent prompts.
• Voice phishing is a form of phishing that occurs over voice-based media, including voice over IP — also called vishing — or plain old telephone service. This type of scam uses speech synthesis software to leave voicemails notifying the victim of suspicious activity in a bank account or credit account. The call solicits the victim to respond to verify their identity, thus compromising their account credentials.
• SMS phishing, or smishing, is a mobile device-oriented phishing attack that uses text messaging to convince victims to disclose account credentials or install malware. The victim is usually asked to click on a link, call a phone number or send an email. The attacker then asks the victim to provide private data. This attack is more difficult to identify, as attached links can be shortened on mobile devices.
• Calendar phishing attempts to fool victims by sending false calendar invites that can be added to calendars automatically. This type of phishing attack attempts to appear as a common event request and includes a malicious link.
• Page hijack attacks redirect the victim to a compromised website that’s a duplicate of the page they intended to visit. The attacker uses a cross-site scripting attack to insert malware on the duplicate website and redirects the victim to that site.

Phishing Techniques

Phishing attacks involve more than just sending an email to victims and hoping they click on a bad link or open a malicious document. Attackers can employ the strategies listed below to entrap their victims:

• URL spoofing. Attackers use JavaScript to place a picture of a legitimate URL over a browser’s address bar. The URL is revealed by hovering over an embedded link and can also be changed using JavaScript.
• Link manipulation. Often referred to as URL hiding, this technique is used in many common types of phishing. Attackers create a malicious URL that’s displayed as if it were linking to a legitimate site or webpage, but the actual link points to a malicious web resource.
• Link shortening. Attackers can use link shortening services, like Bitly, to hide the link destination. Victims have no way of knowing if the shortened URL points to a legitimate website or to a malicious website.
• Homograph spoofing. This type of attack depends on URLs that were created using different characters to read exactly like a trusted domain name. For example, attackers can register domains that use slightly different character sets that are close enough to established, well-known domains.
• Graphical rendering. Rendering all or part of a message as a graphical image sometimes enables attackers to bypass phishing defenses. Some security software products scan emails for particular phrases or terms common in phishing emails. Rendering the message as an image bypasses this.
• Covert redirect. Attackers trick victims into providing personal information by redirecting them to a supposed trusted source that asks them for authorization to connect to another website. The redirected URL is an intermediate, malicious page that solicits authentication information from the victim. This happens before forwarding the victim’s browser to the legitimate site.
• Chatbots. Attackers use AI-enabled chatbots to remove obvious grammatical and spelling errors that commonly appear in phishing emails. Phishing emails using an AI chatbot might make the phishing message sound more complex and real, making it harder to detect.
• AI voice generators. Attackers use AI voice generator tools to sound like a personal authority or family figure over a phone call. This further personalizes the phishing attempt, increasing its likeliness to work. Attackers just need a voice sample using a small audio clip of the victim’s manager or family member.

How to Prevent Phishing

To keep phishing messages from reaching end users, experts advocate combining security safeguards with the following tools:

• Antivirus software.
• Desktop and network firewalls.
• Antispyware software.
• Antiphishing toolbar installed in web browsers.
• Gateway email filter.
• Web security gateway.
• Spam filter.
• Phishing filters from vendors such as Microsoft.

Enterprise mail servers should implement at least one email authentication standard to ensure that inbound emails are verifiable. This can incorporate the DomainKeys Identified Mail protocol, which allows users to filter all mails except those that are cryptographically signed. The Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) protocol is another example. DMARC defines a framework for leveraging protocols to more effectively filter unwanted emails.

There are various resources on the internet that might assist you combat phishing. The Anti-Phishing Working Group Inc. and the federal government’s OnGuardOnline.gov websites both offer guidance on how to identify, avoid, and report phishing attempts. Interactive security awareness training tools, such as Proofpoint Security Awareness Training and Cofense’s PhishMe, can help staff learn how to avoid phishing scams. In addition, websites such as FraudWatch International and MillerSmiles.co.uk broadcast the most recent phishing email subject lines that are circulating online.

Employees should be fully trained on phishing schemes and how to spot them. They should also be warned against clicking on links, attachments, or reading questionable emails from people they do not know.

While phishing can be a tough topic to address at times, by following the basic guidelines and advice mentioned in this article (as well as embracing adequate phishing prevention tools), you can significantly reduce your risk of falling victim to digital scammers.