While many view phishing as a small annoyance, this attack method has maintained longevity for a reason and is still the number one cause of data breaches.

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[aalabb01Participant]

This attack can be easily launched and succeed because of the following reasons:

1- This attack does not need the attacker to invest in the resources that run the attack, because it utilizes resources that are already in use such public email services. Another fold to this point, that malware can be bought from professional criminals. Therefore, an attacker does not need to program a malware.

2- It is a social engineering attack, and this point is very practical and does not need that much of knowledge for a hacker to succeed in the reconnaissance phase. The attacker can just search LinkedIn to know, who works where? Then, he\she can sneak an email that instruct an employee to take an online safety course or any type of email that can be convincing for the company sector.

[jodes92Participant]

It’s also quite difficult to control as most of the controls to manage phishing put reliance on individuals to act in the right manner. Although you can put filters on emails (e.g. at the extreme end you could stop all external emails coming into a company), this can have massive implications for a company- for instance a customer service department will only receive emails from external email addresses so this wouldn’t work.

Therefore the main control is ensuring staff are aware of phishing risk- so awareness training and communications are often implemented but are far from fool proof. Especially as phishing hackers continue to get more and more sophisticated, it becomes more difficult to identify. Phishing attacks used to be identifiable by dodgy email addresses, typos and incorrect grammar however now can be virtually identical to an official email.

[Author]

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