What is a Phishing Attack?

A phishing attack is a type of fraud or cyber attack in which a hacker try to gather personal information and data by sending a destructive website or email to the users.

Hackers try to collect information by which they can steal money or intellectual property as well. Phishing can be done through stealing login credentials or it can be by sending a fake link or simply via conversation or fake website.

How To Detect & Avoid Phishing Attacks?

As we all understand that phishing attack is very harmful and can steal much important and confidential information about our organization. It is very necessary to be updated with these kinds of attacks. Here are some points which everyone should understand to prevent an organization from a phishing attack.

1. Strict password management policies– To prevent from being the victim of phishing attack it is a very necessary step to apply strict password management policies in the organization. Employees should change their password frequently and not be allowed to reuse the password for multiple application or work.
2. Educational Campaigns– Educational campaigns for the employees can be very helpful to minimize the risk of a phishing attack. By introducing secure education and advance security practices, such as not clicking the external links or emails can be a good step to stop phishing attack.
3. Important to check the link destination- It is a very important factor in a phishing attack. Many cyber hackers or fraud websites display the pop-up bubbles on the link destination of real websites. In this case, it is very necessary to understand the real URL which we are clicking. Before clicking the URL make sure that we type the correct URL instead of copy pasting it. It is a good practice to prevent from a phishing attack.
4. Notice Grammatical and stylistic error- To prevent from cyber attack it is very necessary to read the email carefully. Many phishing attacks related to other countries and the fake emails written by non-native English speakers. If you find any emails or website with a grammatical error or stylistic error it can be a scam.
   A fraud email looks like a normal email but the spelling and grammatical errors make them different and easily recognizable, the thing is we have to be very careful in reading emails.
5. Stop open aggressive subject line emails- Phishing attacks are commonly used aggressive or catchy subject lines which make user curious to open their emails, this results in a cyber attack. Cyber hackers do whatever it takes to get people interested in open their emails and websites. They may be used catchy and promising lines to attract users to open their emails. For example- “Get free iPhone to first 50 respondents” or “Your debit card will be suspended”. The main motive of hackers is to make users panic and aggressive. We should take care of this to prevent phishing attack.

“Don’t let Phishing reel on you. Prevent your organization from such harmful attacks because prevention is always better than cure”

Also read: Email Privacy Tips & Tricks To Protect You & your Colleagues from Email Disaster