Protection against Phishing: A Safer Cyber World
Even though most organizations being technology driven make use of a variety of security policies, the highly sophisticated and targeted security attacks like ‘Phishing’ is one of the most commonly employed cyber crime techniques with the sole intention of gaining personal information from the recipient for illegal use. Organizations should thus have time-tested protection from phishing attacks. Survey shows a more than 11% increase in phishing attacks in the first quarter of 2011 with enterprise spear phishing as a more common form of attack towards the second quarter. Hackers who are involved in the sophisticated phishing attacks target employees and gain access to the corporate critical information. The advent of social networking sites has given the hackers a better insight into the individual’s lifestyles and work environment. They then draft emails to extract more personal and professional information from the unsuspecting employees.
The large corporate sectors and business houses are today faced with a major challenge of handling enterprise spear phishing attacks. Being aimed at the people than technology, anti-phishing softwares do not provide the required level of protection against phishing. Organizations use a number of anti phishing attacks such as sender policy framework, email filtering, virus scanning software etc, but these works only to control the high volume low profile malicious attacks on to the user desktops.
An effective way for protection against phishing attacks is to provide the employees with a phishing awareness training designed and streamlined to reduce phishing fail and fall rates. The leaders in field of network security and cyber threats have designed and developed diagnostic solutions that help in simulating phishing attacks and spear phishing in an organizational network, thus enabling the corporate structure to evaluate and analyze the employee readiness against attacks and leverage this for educating the employees. Further, these systems with features of flexibility, scalability, and ability to customize can be deployed either on the premises or on the cloud as a virtual connection.