Types and Countermeasures Against Phishing Attacks
In today’s digital world, internet users and organizations are under a serious threat of cyber-attacks increasing rapidly. However, users fail to mitigate such cyber threats. Now, with this blog, you can follow the countermeasures against phishing attacks to prevent them actively.
Over the past two decades, internet users are harassed by cybercriminals in different ways. Hackers are those criminals who use computers and the internet to gain unauthorized access to user’s data. For this, they trick the target using internet threats such as Phishing, Spoofing, Ransomware attacks, Trojan, etc.
What is Phishing Scams?
The term ‘phishing’ is originated from the word ‘fishing’. In this scam, a ‘Phisher’ trolls on the internet using communication medium and baits users to steal their confidential information. At first glance, information provided by the attacker seems to be legitimate, but it deceives the internet users. Phishing attacks are increasing vigorously by every passing year. Hence, it is important to know the countermeasures for a phishing attack.
Phishing Scams are categorized as follows:
Vishing: Vishing is a kind of Phishing scam conducted through voice mails, cellular telephones, etc. It can be done by simply creating a fake caller-ID to give an appearance to the target that the call is from a trusted entity. On the basis of trust establishment users end up sharing their sensitive information such as, PIN, account number, etc.
Smishing: Smishing is the term used for SMS phishing. It is a technique that tricks the users to reveal their personal information by using text messages through mobiles.
Various Types of Phishing Attacks and Its Countermeasures
Spear Phishing
Spear phishing is one of the common types of phishing attacks that are done by sending an email to a particular targeted individual. An attacker generally steals the user’s information from social media sites like Linked-in, Facebook, etc. They use fake accounts to send emails that seem to be genuine to receivers. For example, attackers used to target employees of the finance department by sending them fake emails. In which, an attacker can try to impersonate as the victim’s manager and can ask to transfer large amounts of money in a bank account.
Whale Phishing
It is a form of phishing attack that is used to achieve big targets. Whale phishing is a technique to trick organizations and companies for stealing their confidential data. This type of scam generally happens to board members of the company. Attackers can simply target them, as it only requires the company’s email id to deceive them.
Deceptive Phishing
Nowadays, it is one of the most common types of phishing attacks. Deceptive phishing emails involves threatening messages to scare users by creating urgency.
Attackers such as PayTM scammers send emails to customers and ask them to click on a link to rectify a mistake in their account. As the user clicks on the link, it takes them to a fake webpage which might look similar to that of an actual PayTM login page. Here user enters the login credential details, and this information can be further used for illegal activities.
Pharming
It is a type of Phishing attack that hackers use to steal sensitive or personal information from the users on the internet. In this attack, the hacker uses malicious code injected into the user’s computer system or the server that misdirects users to fraudulent websites without their consent.
Dropbox Phishing
Some phishers do not use ‘baiting’ to deceive their targets. Instead, they send attack emails to individuals or companies. They generally use common popular sites like Dropbox to target the users. For example, cybercriminals may start the attack by creating a fake sign-in Dropbox page which seems similar to the original Dropbox site. By doing so, phishers try to confuse the victim and trick them to submit their personal information.
In, these aforementioned phishing attacks or email scams, it has been analyzed that the primary motive of attackers is to convince users and lure email recipients to act immediately. They want them to click on a link or open the attached file. By doing so, users fall for the scam and the malware gets installed in their system.
The malware installed through phishing scam may be a web Trojan.It takes the credentials from the victim’s computer or maybe a key logger that tracks the key inputs of the victim. Or it may be a kind of Ransomware that holds or encrypt the sensitive data of the user. Recipients can simply delete or avoid such type of scamming emails to prevent themselves from becoming a victim of cybercrime.
How to Identify Phishing Email Messages or Links?
Some of the phishing emails have a number of signs that can help to detect a scam and unwanted emails. Moreover, users can use the customized Computer Forensic Tool like MailXaminer to investigate the email crime scene wisely. Here we are providing some of the most efficient ways to recognize phishing emails or links which can be used to obtain high accuracy detection for scam emails.
Domain Links with Limited Life
Fraudsters generally register for the domains that look similar to the legitimate company’s domain in order to fool the users. For example, criminals may use the domain name like “amazonn.com” that looks and sounds similar to “amazon.com” which is the registered domain of the known e-commerce company “Amazon”. Phishers may register for such domains by using illegally obtained credit cards.
URLs Not Match
Phishers are also exploiting emails by displaying fake URLs instead of the actual ones that can be identified in the HTML view of the page. For example, the link is masked as amazon.com but it actually is fakesite.com. To identify and prevent these kinds of scams, all links must be checked by the user before clicking on them. When “a href” tag hosted link is different than the linked text represented, then there is a possibility that it’s not an authentic link.
Verify Before Clicking on Links Which Contains WordsLike- “Click Here”
Scam emails mostly contain the linked text like “Click Here”, “Privacy Policy”, “User Agreement”, etc. Users click these linked texts in order to explore the information. But, with these links, Phisherstricks users to click on it and lands the user to a fake web page that asks them to submit their personal information.
HTML Emails Deceiving
Most of the emails contain plain text, or HTML, or a combination of both, which is known as a multipart format email. While HTML email does not necessarily indicate it as a phishing email. However, it does make some deceptions as seen in the phishing attacks. Without using the HTML, technical, and deceptiveness, cyber-attacks are not possible for a phisher.
An Email with Several Links
It is a continuous feature of presenting many links in an email. The numbers of links mean the number of links present in the HTML part of an email, which defines tags with “a href” attribute.
Links Having Many Dots
This is another way in which the attacker tries to represent legitimate-looking URLs. They use sub-domains which contains several dots in the URL like http://www.google.com/your-bank.data.update.com. These may appear as the legitimate link but it is using several sub-domains to deceive the user.
Contains Malformed HTML Java Script
Java scripts can be used to apply features in different ways such as for creating popup windows, to change the status bar of the browser or email client. It may appear in the body of email directly or can be embedded in a link. Attackers generally use these java scripts to hide the code or information from the user. After this, they try to potentially launch sophisticated cyberattacks.
Final Words
Here in “Countermeasures Against Phishing Attacks” blog, we have specified various types of phishing attacks and their countermeasures. It will help internet users to protect them from several types of phishing attacks and email threats. Additionally, we have discussed the various ways to recognize phishing email messages or links that help to avoid phishing scams.