Phishing

With our current digital era, pretty much all businesses operate more and more business online.  It’s because the online service is fast, convenient, and we can reach out to do business with companies throughout the world.  However, beside the huge advantage of digital realm, it makes each of the business so vulnerable for cyberattack.

Phishing is one of the most popular attack for financial institutions.  Base on the 2016 Global Trend from Kaspersky Lab, “In 2016, the share of financial phishing increased 13.14 percentage points to 47.48% of all phishing detections”.  We can see the huge threats increase in 2016 and I think it will continue to grow more.

Phishing is a criminal act of using electronic communication to obtain the confidential information from people such as login id, password, credit card information, SSN, address, etc.  The most popular example that we often see from Phishing is email spoofing, which guide users open the email and start following the link and enter the personal information on the fake website that looks almost the same as the trusted bank or any trusted financial institutions.  Another example of phishing is the email contain the link to the website that has malware.

There is no way to stop or control Phishing and the only way that users can protect themselves is everybody should have some basic training and prepare for ourselves with some basic security awareness so when dealing or seeing Phishing attack, we know and stay away from it.

Reference:

Kaspersky Team.  Cybersecurity in financial institutions 2016 — and what 2017 holds.  (Mar 27, 2017).  Retrieved at 9:25am on May 9, 2017 from https://business.kaspersky.com/from-the-perils-to-strategies/6682/

Wikepedia.  Phishing.  (2017).  Retrieved at 9:25am on 5/9/2017 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing