Phish Tales
Perhaps you have heard a multitude of tall tales about phishing attacks. We’re here to tell you that this isn’t something that only old people and young children fall for in their personal digital journeys.
Successful phishing scams can have a devastating impact. Even phishing attacks that target an organization or company affect the individuals who work for that organization, or customers and partners of that organization.
It’s estimated over one in five data breaches involve phishing. There are several types of phishing attacks, including standard, spear, clone, SMS, voice and whaling. Some target an entire company, while others prey on senior staff. But this problem is that this cyber threat is often underestimated.
Verizon’s 2023 DBIR found that 36% of all data breaches involved phishing. Phishing is one of four main ways that a cyber criminal can compromise an organization, and it accounts for more than 60% of all social engineering attacks, according to Verizon.
One of the main aims of phishing is to capture people’s login credentials, and according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report, compromised credentials are the most common cause of data breaches. It found that they were used in 19% of all cyber attacks.
Phishing scams are the fraudulent attempt to gain possession of sensitive data or information such as passwords, usernames, personal identifying information, trade secrets, and more.
Cyber attackers typically use email campaigns, bogus websites, instant messaging, and text messaging to fool individuals within a company to disclose this information, download malware or ransomware, or both.
Threat actors leverage what has long been perceived as the weakest link in the security chain – the user.
Phishing is one of the more insidious types of breach because attackers now aren’t hacking in, they are logging in. Simply put, a successful attacker looks the same as a successful user.
No matter how it’s delivered, a phishing attack poses a substantial risk to your company, regardless of its size or industry. A successful attack can result in the following possible outcomes:
Tangible:
Financial exposure and extortion
Data exfiltration such as PII and IP
Disruption of operations
Account takeover
APT – Malware and ransomware
Intangible:
Reputational damages
Public scrutiny – Security practices come under question
Customer churn
Attack campaigns
Lost partnerships and contracts
The threat goes beyond the simple harvesting of user credentials and can in fact result in much more malicious outcomes.
Often, the tactic is used to gain a foothold as a part of a larger attack, such as an advanced persistent threat (APT) event. An advanced persistent threat is a broad term used to describe an attack campaign in which an intruder, or team of intruders, establishes an illicit, long-term presence on a network in order to mine highly sensitive data.
With the vast number of businesses being attacked and affected by phishing scams, you must approach the issue at hand with the right mindset.
In this ebook, we will take a closer look at the financial, productivity, Advanced Persistent Threats (APT), and reputational impacts that businesses experience as a result of success phishing attacks.