Cybersecurity Awareness on Phishing

It is another week in cybersecurity month, what lessons have you learned so far from our weekly series of “Taking your online series to another level”? How do you see yourself in cyber? Feel free to drop your reactions in the comment box.

For the past two weeks, we emphasized on the importance of securing your passwords and using password managers to keep track of all your passwords across diverse platforms. In an effort to enhance your company’s cyber security defenses, we want to highlight a common cyber-attack that everyone should be aware of - Phishing.

"Phishing" is the most common type of cyber-attack that affects organizations like yours. Phishing attacks can take many forms, but they all share a common goal – getting you to share sensitive information such as login credentials, credit card information, or bank account details.

Although your institution maintains controls to protect your networks and computers from cyber-attacks, experience has proven we are never ready enough.

We’ve outlined a few different types of phishing attacks to watch out for:

1. Phishing: In this type of attack, hackers impersonate a real company to obtain your login credentials. You may receive an e-mail asking you to verify your account details with a link that takes you to an imposter login screen that delivers your information directly to the attackers.
2. Spear Phishing: Spear phishing is a more sophisticated phishing attack that includes customized information that makes the attacker seem like a legitimate source. They may use your name and phone number and refer to your company name in the e-mail to trick you into thinking they have a connection to you, making you more likely to click a link or attachment that they provide.
3. Whaling: Whaling is a popular ploy aimed at getting you to transfer money or send sensitive information to an attacker via email by impersonating a real company executive. Using a fake domain that appears similar to ours, they look like normal emails from a high-level official of the company, typically the CEO or CFO, and ask you for sensitive information (including usernames and passwords).
4. Shared Document Phishing: You may receive an e-mail that appears to come from file-sharing sites like Dropbox or Google Drive alerting you that a document has been shared with you. The link provided in these e-mails will take you to a fake login page that mimics the real login page and will steal your account credentials.

There are quite a number of ways your company could implement to mitigate such cyber incidents such as;

• Do not click on links or attachments from senders that you do not recognize. Be especially wary of .zip or other compressed or executable file types.
• Do not provide sensitive personal information (like usernames and passwords) over email.
• Watch for email senders that use suspicious or misleading domain names.
• Inspect URLs carefully to make sure they’re legitimate and not imposter sites.