To explain in simple terms, phishing is an attempt to deceive a user and make him/her
think that a given source as a legitimate enterprise requesting for essential personal data out. Such requests for data might appear all correct at the first glance and seem to have arrived from an authentic source, but they actually do not. Such scams request users to reply via email, respond to a phone request or follow any website URL.
E-mail phishing attempts provide clear hint that a concerned request is not authentic and would take users to a fraudulent webpage. Any links to websites that are sent through e-mail takes the user to web pages that appear similar to original brand names. Banks, E-bay and any kind of online e-cash services such as Paypal are few common targets and have suffered hugely of phishing attacks. This is the reason why there is a huge demand for phishing awareness programs.
What does a Phishing e-mail look like?
Advanced phishing awareness programs works towards making an average employee or a layman learn how a Phishing e-mail looks like. These emails most often use emotional triggers and make users respond on impulse without thinking much. In the process users hardly put their mind in trying to figure out if the source is correct or not. An apt awareness programs presents us with the possible indicators of phishing e-mails that include the following aspects:-
* Poor grammar
* Misspellings
* The email address does not match with the name
* Makes use of a name of a real company but offers incorrect email-address
* Makes attempts to prove its authenticity, by using words such as Official
* Has unsolicited request for personal data
Today there are many generic solutions available for phishing protection tracing dangerous impacts of this threat. Some anti-phishing tool only addresses the people riskfactor. However one of the recent trends has been harping on incident based reactive approach towards phishing attacks. Leading market players provide phishing protection
solutions that help organizations to estimate whether their employees are completely updated about new age social engineering attacks. The services:-
* Helps enterprises in estimating the probable hazards associated with phishing
* Offers elastic reporting and incorporate them back into the companys chief performance-indicator framework
* Offers a road map" solution concentrating on security awareness and training within an enterprise
* Helps to recognize weakness within people, method and technology links
* Helps in prioritizing remediation attempts through useful benchmarking and maturity analysis
* Helps in increasing employee awareness and expertise to safeguard crucial information