Two greatest concerns of the world today are phishing and social engineering
. It has affected global enterprises with spear phishing attacks that have become so sophisticated that at times its impossible to recognize and avert them. These sophisticated attacks are created by the social engineers and phishers in order to derive crucial information and spread it amidst malicious third party intruders. This information gathered can range from any kind of personal data of an individual to corporate data that is crucial to an enterprise.
Phishing attacks generally have a negative impact on an organizations image and brand value. It can therefore significantly lead to financial losses in future owing to loss of customer trust and decrease in shareholder value. All this can happen with only one employee being a victim of phishing attack. Therefore, it is essential to look out for ways that lead to protection from phishing in a cost-efficient and simple way, making employees aware of its various consequences.
The Way Phishing Works
In simple terms, phishing is nothing but a criminal strategy that employs both the tactics of technical deception and social engineering in order to steal financial, identity and other personal information. Social engineering schemes generally make use of hoax and fraud e-mails claiming to be from authentic business sources. They ultimately end up leading recipients to certain fraudulent websites. These websites are created by the phishers in order to rob the critical data that includes passwords as well as usernames.
In the present day and age there has been numerous phishing awareness programs and solution that secures the user from technology attacks. The two vulnerable areas in this regard are the people and the process. A strategic phishing attack generally aims in these two specified area. The third party intruders are completely aware that these are the complex zone to safeguard.
Keeping this concern in mind eminent service providers have come up with innovative anti phishing software. It is in the form of an automated device that is internally installed in an enterprise where the people. Process and technology information is already fed in. Post that a customized phishing attack is set up at the target audience and the solution traces the user response. Social behaviors towards these attacks are evaluated and a detailed report is created based on the same. Furthermore, these solutions also offers statistics on user behavior, estimates the percentage of security awareness amidst the employees, recognizes data leakage, evaluates Data Loss Prevention programs as well as examines the incident response program.