Can Businesses Really Prevent Phishing Attacks?

The term phishing comes from fishing where bait is thrown into the water, luring the fish. The scammers use emails as a bait to lure victims by tricking them into believing that the email is genuine and they need to open the link given or download a file as suggested. When the victims proceed to do that, their personal information is stolen or the computer is hacked using the malware, thereby allowing the scammers to dupe the victims.

Dated back to the 1990s, phishing is still one of the most dangerous forms of a cyberattack. Individuals, enterprises, global organizations; none are spared by the criminals. As times have become advanced, criminals have become more slippery and sophisticated. The FBI found that the amount of losses incurred by business enterprises has doubled during the years 2016-2018. The scammers are coming up with the latest methods of duping the victims and bypassing the security systems of the enterprise.

Preventing phishing attacks is a task that needs to be handled with an iron glove. Business enterprises should ensure that they have multiple security layers and use advanced email security solutions to prevent the scammers from trying to dupe their employees. Any enterprise that becomes a victim of a phishing attack faces more than one issue that could potentially ruin their business.

Financial Loss

• A single phishing attack could drain the enterprise for billions of dollars.
• It becomes difficult to recover from that kind of an attack for any business.

Productivity Loss

• When scammers lock the employees out of the systems by taking control, the employees are helpless to continue their work.
• Or if a scammer succeeds in hijacking an employee’s account and prevents the employee from accessing it, the productivity goes down.
• Until the system is released from the clutches of the criminals, there can be nothing done. The criminals cold in the meantime, steal all the information existing in the system.

Data Compromise

• One of the main targets of phishing attacks is data, apart from money.
• The data once stolen by the criminals could be used in any way and the enterprises do not have any way of minimizing the damages.
• The shareholders, customers, etc. could suffer losses and file a lawsuit against the business for not being able to safeguard their information.

Reputation Destroyed

• Imagine building a business worth billions of rupees and still being duped by criminals due to a phishing attack.
• The customers and clients tend to lose trust in an enterprise that failed to protect its own systems.
• Also, when the scammers use the brand names of famous businesses for fraudulent purposes, the name and reputation take a blow in the market.
  It has been found that around 30% of the phishing emails get opened by the employees. It is a staggering ratio considering how a scammer could potentially drain money from enterprises. Preventing phishing attacks is a continuous process. Enterprises need to invest in powerful email security systems that use advanced artificial intelligence to detect malicious emails and alert users.

The process of reporting and blocking the suspicious emails should also be easy and maintaining a record on the interactive dashboard will help the management keep track of how many phishing emails have been successfully blocked and how many malicious files have been quarantined.

Advanced technology like computer visions ‘sees’ the emails minutely and recognizes the empty logos as fake. The concept of brand profiling helps in identifying that the email does not fit the set pattern of the brand and could be suspicious. The same is followed for employees in an organization. Any email that seems to come from an employee but doesn’t fit the profiling pattern is marked as suspicious/ fraudulent/ external network, etc. to alert the users and help them report the email.

The email security system should work seamlessly with any of the email and other systems used by the business enterprises. The option of being able to report a suspicious email from any device and any location would be a boon as most employees prefer to use their devices when working.