What is Phishing? Understanding the Risks and Protecting your Business, your Employees, and your Customers

Since the beginning of 2024, over 350 FORUM domain name decisions have mentioned “phishing.”

Phishing is a type of cyberattack which tricks individuals into revealing sensitive information, such as login credentials, credit card numbers, or confidential personal or client data. Attackers often disguise themselves as trustworthy entities, such as banks, colleagues, or even legal organizations, to lure unsuspecting victims into clicking on malicious links or downloading harmful attachments.

Falling victim to a phishing attack can have severe consequences. Compromised email accounts can lead to the exposure of confidential communications. Hackers may also gain access to sensitive financial information or use stolen data to impersonate you or your employees or your customers, damaging your professional reputation and exposing you to legal liability.

Attackers often use infringed domain names to fool users in phishing schemes. The infringed domain names can be used to attract users to a phishing website or to trick users with emails appearing to be from a legitimate company email address.

Phishing attackers may use multiple infringed domain names that each contain only a slight variation from the authentic trademarked brand name.

In order to protect yourself from phishing attacks, you should educate yourself, verify suspicious requests, use strong passwords, and keep your software up to date.

In order to protect your organization and your brand, you should regularly monitor for domain name registrations that contain mere typographical variations on your trademarked terms and challenge those registrations in arbitration, if necessary.