Learn what phishing is, how it works, and why it’s one of today’s most common cyber threats. Discover the latest free news, key prevention strategies, and valuable information to keep your data safe, and learn how to report phishing to your security operations teams.
Definition of Phishing
Phishing is usually best described as hackers’ method to trick and exploit their targets for money. Hackers try to use a variety of attack vectors, including embedding a rogue link into an email message, spam, voice phishing, SMS text messages, social engineering, and physical contact.
Leveraging these phishing vectors, hackers and scammers usually hope to access user credentials, bank account numbers and other personal information, credit card details and information, social security numbers, mobile devices, computer, and electronic medical records (EMR). These entities result in money theft, information exfiltration, or exposure of personal health issues.
Gaining access to this sensitive information through phishing allows hackers to access personal and corporate sensitive information even with security email filters enabled. Once a hacker gains access to user credentials, impostor attacks and business email compromises become a reality.
Hackers will use various types of phishing, including spear, whaling, clone, and HTTPs.
Phishing remains a very fluid and common vector, especially with the inception of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools.
How Email Phishing Types Became the Most Popular Channel for Hackers
Email remains the primary communication method globally. Many users have several email accounts for personal and professional use. Thanks in part to Google and Yahoo, getting a new email is only a few clicks away.
Email has become the top channel for hackers to execute sophisticated phishing attempts and distribute their messages, including embedding a malicious link within the message. These messages also contain an attachment, malicious malware files, and well-crafted language to help hackers steal money and data from their victims.
Because of the volume of messages received, users often skim through a message, assume it is from someone they know, and even click the link asking them to reset their password.
How Phishing Works
Phishing starts with a goal. Does the hacker want to gain access to the victim’s email account? Does the hacker want to steal user credentials so they can begin sending emails using the victim’s accounts? Or does the hacker want the user to download an attachment loaded with ransomware malware so they can steal credit card numbers, money from bank accounts, and other information?
The simple answer is yes to all three.
Hackers often establish a goal when creating a phishing campaign. Within their campaign strategy, the goal could be gaining access to user credentials at a major corporation, hospital, or bank.
Another phishing campaign involves tricking the user into clicking a link and downloading malware that allows the hacker to control the device for an extended period. This type of phishing is prevalent, especially if the goal is to steal intellectual property and customer information.
Thanks in part to AI and ML, hackers can make quick real-time adjustments based on feedback within their AI agents and models. These adjustments include adding a malicious link, altering the phishing message to include additional languages and dialects, and changing the velocity against several banks.
History and Evolution of Phishing
Phishing’s origins started with compromising users through physical contact. Hackers would identify someone in a coffee shop wearing their company badge. Some hackers would shoulder-surf a target in public, reading the phones or glancing over at the victim’s laptop for valuable information. Then, based on the information they read, hackers would open a friendly but fake discussion with the person.
Social engineering (SE) is a typical phishing scam used by hackers to scan their targets’ social media accounts, looking for enough background information to make the initial contact. Hackers use personal data, including researching people’s workplaces and schools. Access to this information helps the hacker appear as a legitimate, not a fake, contact to the victim.
With the rise of public media platforms, email, messaging applications, spam, and other suspicious activity, SE remained an essential phishing component. An organization must develop a process to help the user community report SE-type behavior.
The Role of SE Techniques in Phishing
A critical piece of phishing involves SE. This crafty tool is less about technology and more about human manipulation talent. Hackers scour legitimate community media platforms looking for the ideal victims to target. Some victims could be members of an online gaming club, work for a number of world-renowned corporations, or be part of a local business in a global supply chain.
Hackers search legitimate LinkedIn profiles for people in finance, human resources, supply, manufacturing, and sales. Using brilliant language skills, hackers email, call, or text their targets, posing as someone who knows them or impersonating something the victim may have known from their past.
This initial warm connection is the start of a total manipulation phishing strategy to gain the victim’s trust and trick them into releasing valuable information. By gaining confidence, the hackers exchange more emails and text messages, attempting to learn more about the victim, what they do for a living, and what information they can access at work.
Most importantly, hackers can send phishing emails with malware and a link to redirect users to rogue websites. Sometimes, they increase their sense of urgency by demanding usernames, passwords, and even credit card numbers.
Suppose there is an increase in urgency or a change of tone inside these emails. In that case, the victims should immediately recognize the warning signs and discontinue conversations, emails, text, or chats with the hacker.
The Impact of AI on Phishing
Before AI, phishing was already the most effective way to distribute malware, execute business email compromise (BEC), steal credentials, and impersonate others. Similar organizations have also invested in AI. AI-empowered hackers used this new capability to develop faster tools, including ransomware malware files, complex distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, and near-perfect fake content for phishing emails.
More importantly, hackers leveraged AI to determine which targets would deliver the highest rate of financial scams and create havoc. Hackers also gained exceptional value by feeding their telemetry into their AI models. These models will continuously learn from previous attacks and provide more accurate and sophisticated ways to hack their victims.
These new advanced phishing attacks became fully automated, requiring minimal human interaction. Hackers can create several automated attacks based on AI modeling datasets that will self-learn, self-correct, and self-create.
Why an Organization Needs to Ramp Up AI Investments
Phishing attacks in full automation mode powered by AI are compelling enough to motivate an organization to invest in defensive cybersecurity tools. The demand for cybersecurity experts, including security operations engineers, security architects, cloud security experts, and zero-trust engineers, continues to increase.
Increases in phishing attempts, including fraudulent emails, identity theft, and the distribution of malicious links inside of emails, cost global organizations millions of dollars each year. The amount an organization needs to spend to stop suspicious emails from entering their domains is far less than the cost of an actual data breach.
Technology alone doesn’t prevent all phishing or SE attacks. Security awareness training quickly becomes critical in defending against AI-powered phishing attacks.
The Importance of Security Awareness, Knowledge-Sharing and Attack Simulation
Leveraging real-world phishing attack telemetry embedded with an AI-powered security awareness knowledge sharing solution continues to drive more effective education to the end-user community. Advanced email security providers like Trustifi invested in AI-enabled security awareness and attack simulation based on actual telemetry information to help organizations stop sophisticated AI-powered phishing attacks.
By using actual telemetry, the users will gain access to updated real-world phishing attack vectors within their training modules and when they are tested with attack simulations.
This revolutionary security education strategy, provided by Trustifi, helps lower the organization’s risk from phishing scams, identity theft, redirects to fraudulent websites, and other sophisticated attacks. This learning model also generated a report to assist with various compliance mandates.
Why Trustifi?
A growing number of sophisticated phishing attempts leveraging well-crafted phishing messages require far more than a traditional layer of security. Trustif’s advanced secure email security, powered by AI, continues to set the goal standard for stopping phishing scams and unauthorized access to sensitive data. It blocks malicious software from embedding on end-user devices or redirecting to a hacker’s websites.
