Phishing Threats

Email phishing is a type of cybercrime carried out through fraudulent emails that are designed to trick a reader into believing they are legitimate, usually for financial gain. In 2019, phishing was found to be the most prevalent type of cybercrime. Unfortunately, as long as we have email, phishing attacks will persist. To do that you’d have to go to the source, and sadly as soon as one phishing fraud is discovered and removed another appears in its place.

Companies today have more than just one kind of phishing attack to worry about. Phishing emails come in many shapes and sizes and include:

• Whaling Attacks – these target the big fish, such as company executives
• CEO Fraud – hackers impersonate company executives to get employees to wire money or expose data
• Spear Phishing – phishing emails that appear to come from a trusted source
• Brand Forgery – using well-known company names or logos to look legitimate
• Business Email Compromise (BEC) - attacks that gain access to corporate email accounts
• Zero-Day Attacks that other anti-phishing software hasn’t identified
• Domain Spoofing – emulating legitimate websites, usually for credential harvesting
• Malware – usually in the form a phishing email attachment, these cause havoc once inside your network
• Ransomware – hackers access your data and hold it hostage until they are paid.

The best defense is to stop phishing emails from getting into employee inboxes in the first place. INKY can prevent phishing attacks with state-of-the-art protection that goes beyond any other anti-phishing solution on the market. INKY uses machine learning and anomaly detection algorithms to create behavior profiles and social graphs of all users. When an email arrives, it can identify suspicious behavior or suspicious identities that other phishing software miss. INKY also flags potential impersonation attempts with color-coded warning banners. These can’t-miss warnings help provide on-going training for employees and give easy-to-follow guidance as threats are identified.

Yes. By their very nature, mobile devices lack the security of a desktop computer and make us all easy targets for phishing scams. To begin, mobile devices are small and compact, which means that we can’t always notice the same level of details in the emails we answer on our mobile devices. The same is true for the websites we visit on our phones. We generally tend to trust the links on our phones, but the details are difficult to see and mobile views hide things we might otherwise consider to be warning signs. To make matters worse, mobile devices are generally designed to support work that’s “on-the-go”. This fact alone can lead many of us to be a little more careless than we would be at an office computer. INKY can protect your employees from phishing attacks inside and outside of the office.

If you do not already have an anti-phishing solution, you are putting your entire organization at risk. Built-in solutions like ATP (Advanced Threat Protection) and Safelinks in Office 365 or Exchange, or anti-phishing software in Google Suite cannot stop many of these attacks. And sadly, most anti-phishing software on the market relies on lists of known threats. By the time these threats are known, criminals have already moved on to new hacking strategies. Once phishing emails get through to your employees, your organization is at risk. Even with training, phishing emails today are sophisticated enough that the human eye can’t always detect signs of fraud.

INKY is an affordable, cloud-based email security platform and anti-phishing solution that can prevent phishing by catching almost anything the hackers send. Using computer vision, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, INKY can detect and uncover the most sophisticated attacks– keeping your company safe from the worst kinds of phishing attacks.

Cybercrime is profitable and oftentimes email is an organization’s weakest security link. Once the security breach has begun, email hackers have access to all sorts of information – from personal data to sensitive corporate documents.  Cybercriminals and their email phishing attempts are getting more sophisticated all the time. Hackers develop email phishing scams for the purposes of:

Identity theft – getting your personal information in order to commit fraud

Medical theft – accessing your health insurance or medical records to use or bill for medical services

Payment redirects – posing as a company or vendor and ask you to redirect payments to their accounts

Blackmail – which includes ransomware in which scammers trick you into downloading and installing software that allows them to access your files, lock them, and hold them hostage until you pay what they demand.