What is Phishing?

Phishing is the act of attempting to manipulate the recipient of a malicious email into opening and engaging with it. A sender of a malicious email intends to deceive a victim by making the email seem important and from a reputable source. These phishing emails may include harmful attachments, like PDF or Word documents, which once opened can cause harm to the user’s computer by installing forms of malware, ransomware, or other unsavoury software. Phishing emails can also contain malicious links in the body that can lead a user to a fraudulent site. These sites are used to collect confidential information such as usernames and passwords, or to install malware onto a device. Once the victim’s information has been obtained, scammers will monetise the data by selling it to the highest bidder on Dark Web sites.

Types of Phishing

Deceptive Phishing is any attack by which fraudsters impersonate a legitimate company and attempt to steal people’s personal information or login credentials.

Spear Phishing is when fraudsters customise their attack emails with a target’s name, position, company, work phone number or other information in an attempt to trick the recipient into taking some action being requested by a known connection.

CEO Fraud is targeting an executive in an organisation. Fraudsters attempt to isolate an executive and steal their login credentials. With these credentials they are able to perform a CEO scam. CEO scams occur when an email, seemingly addressed from a CEO or other member of senior management, is falsely created by a scammer in order to exploit the trust of employees. The impostor email seeks for the target to wire funds or share confidential information with the scammer.

With the number of spam emails sent daily expected to increase to almost 190 billion a day through 2023, it’s increasingly important to be able to spot the tell-tale signs of a fraudulent email and protect your personal and business data, and your tech from malicious viruses and malware.

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