Phishing attacks are one of the most common security challenges faced by both individuals and businesses when it comes to protecting their information. Whether it’s gaining access to passwords, credit cards, or other sensitive information, hackers use email, social media, phone calls, and any form of communication to steal valuable data. Businesses are, of course, a particularly valuable target.
Read More: The Most Common Financial Scams Found Online
COMMON TYPES OF PHISHING ATTACKS AGAINST BUSINESSES
Spear Phishing
This type of Schemes involve using a fake company name (spoofing) but also important details about the target. Just like in sales, a rep finds the name, position, and other customizations and includes them in a pitch’s email.
Attackers will find the same tokens and use them to trap more victims. This is a particularly dangerous trick.
Company Impersonation
One of the most common forms of phishing is when attackers impersonate your brand. This is usually done with an email associated with a domain very similar to the target company (e.g., “firstname@amazon-support”). It’s also a hard-to-detect attack for businesses, as you won’t know about it until someone is tricked or you’re given a tip.
Read More: Infographic: Email Marketing vs. Other Digital Marketing Channels
Phishing Emails
Like email Account takeover scam, this phishing attack is carried out via email. The difference is that the phishing scammer uses an email address that looks like a legitimate email address, person or company.
The email contains a request to click a link, change a password, send a payment, reply with confidential information, or open an attachment.
Email Account Takeover
Every member of your leadership and management team is vulnerable. When a phishing scam acquires a high-profile executive’s email credentials, it is likely to target anyone using the same email address. Possible targets would be: colleagues, team members, and even customers (if they’ve already hacked this information).
Read More: Keep Your IRA Investments Safe: Spotting IRA Scams
Phone Phishing or Voice Phishing
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) scammers are once again posing as a company.
This technique also employs other types of phishing, including the use of personally identifiable information about targets and the identity of people in the organization (e.g. CEO) to gain better insight into the overall scam.
To help businesses better understand how to avoid falling victim to phishing attacks, we asked several security experts to share their thoughts on this to share how businesses are most commonly targeted by phishing attacks and how businesses can prevent them.
Read More: How to Stop and Prevent a Botnet Attack on Your Web
The infographic below was designed by betrugstest which discuss the most common phishing attacks and how to prevent them.
(via www.betrugstest.com)