Phishing and spear-phishing attacks are one of the most common and discussed problems in the field of cybersecurity. Posing as known or trusted entities or individuals via incoming emails or messages, attackers try to steal data, obtain sensitive information such as bank account details, login credentials to access accounts, and download malware onto the user’s computer or mobile devices. That’s why it is crucial to take security measures and use anti-phishing services to prevent and block phishing attacks and phishing scams.
What does anti-phishing software actually do
Anti-phishing prevention or anti-phishing protection refers to taking steps to protect yourself from an attempt at fraud. Anti-phishing protection may prevent suspicious messages or emails containing phishing attempts from reaching an organization’s email server or a company’s email system. Anti-spam measures also help prevent people from opening emails containing malicious content.
What are the challenges of anti-phishing solutions
An effective anti-phishing solution must always be able to stay up to date in a field where new methods and phishing attacks are constantly being discovered. Anti-phishing services protect users from fraudulent messages, suspicious links, malicious URLs, and other threats that could end up revealing sensitive data to phishing attackers.
Here are some of the challenges that anti-phishing tools will encounter:
Social engineering threats are still a huge issue
Phishers often use social engineering techniques rather than technological ones. They manipulate people by triggering their emotional responses. Phishing leverages many forms of social engineering schemes in quid pro quo, intimidation, and user impersonation fraud.
An imperfect situation
Anti-phishing solutions are not just a platform that reads incoming messages but applies logic and rules to stop phishing attacks. Some phishing emails will make it through the gateway to the end-user. Anti-phishing technology will help in most cases.
Security Awareness Training – a must for all organizations
Anti-phishing awareness training (or anti-phishing education) teaches people how to identify potential phishing attempts and impersonation attacks and how to deploy anti-phishing solutions and anti-phishing protection measures. End-user training continues to be necessary to educate them about how to recognize phishing attacks.
A better way to improve the overall effectiveness of phishing attack training is to use live demonstrations covering all attack vectors with phishing content. This resonates well when users visualize how the security email gateway stops a phishing email attack. Having an end-user listen to an actual Vishing fraudulent message call also helps drive home the point for employees to understand how phishing happens across several channels, not just email. Having users witness during training a successful phishing attack, not just simulated, also helps drive the importance of security awareness is everyone’s job.
Phishing has become more difficult to detect and prevent
Email continues to be the preferred method of communication. Phishing emails are no longer a single threat attack. Many hackers will reach out to victims via the SMS channel or social engineering direct phone call.
Farm Phishing Attacks
Farm phishing is specifically designed to develop the attacker-victim relationship over some time. Many initial emails seem friendly and intend to build a rapport with the victim. The email security gateway solution most often will not stop the email flow for this attack. This method shows how security awareness training could greatly benefit the organization.
Inside the training material, there should be more focus on social and reverse social engineering. Email, SMS, social media in-mail, and voicemail could be used in the single or multi-thread attack.
Here is an phishing email example of a multi-thread phishing attack with social engineering.
“Good morning Mary,
It’s Steve from IT again. Did you not get my voicemail? Come on; I need you to reset your password. Do me a huge favor and click on this link, http://cahng.mypassord.org. Today, Mary!”
Looking at this message, notice the tone of the news; very direct, hostile, and intimidating. Also, end-users should check to see if any letters have misspelled words. Also, the users should check the sender’s email to see if the email did come from Steve in IT and the corporate email domain. That should be the first step to prevent phishing attacks.
Trustifi advanced email security with comprehensive protection for anti-phishing
There is no full-proof solution to stop phishing attacks, but that doesn’t mean that an anti-phishing software isn’t necessary. Organizations have successfully combined Trustifi cloud-based advanced email security solutions with accurate threat intelligence. Trustifi’s ease-of-use management platform enabled inbound and outbound email protection with a few clicks of the mouse. Other email security platforms and certain anti-phishing protection services require several days to set up and augment their solution with third-party products.
Trustifi’s consolidated strategy for email security combined several critical protection layers (anti-phishing included) into one solution. Email and security teams can easily adjust the policies to stop phishing attacks, suspicious URLs and attachments in email, and business email compromise attacks, along with blocking outbound data exfiltration breaches caused by ransomware attacks.
Trustifi’s Inbound Shield imposes a layer of protection between your email system and the outside world. Inbound Shield’s anti-phishing technology scans, identifies, and blocks suspicious inbound and internal emails using Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning(ML), and dynamic engines. Our cloud-based service also uses DNS authentication and DMARC, DKIM and SPF protocols to spot potential authentication problems. Along with the inbound shield, Trustifi also consolidates all email security protection layers and key features into one solution, including:
- The Trustifi Outbound Shield
- The Trustifi Data Loss Prevention.
- The Trustifi cloud-based email archiving for e-discovery.
- Trustifi Account Compromise Detection
Supporting all compliance and privacy mandates
Trustifi’s consolidated email security strategy for anti-phishing also supports many compliance and privacy mandates out-of-the-box without any additional cost, including:
Conclusion
Trustifi is a cyber security firm featuring solutions delivered on software as a service platform. Trustifi leads the market with the easiest to use and deploy email security products, providing both inbound and outbound email security from a single vendor.
As a global cybersecurity provider of both inbound and outbound email protection, Trustifi currently supports customers from countries including the USA, Canada, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, the UK, the Netherlands, India, the UAE, China, and Japan, Cyprus, the Philippines, and more. The company has also developed “One-Click Compliance” capabilities that cater to world security regulations, including PDPO for Hong Kong, POPI for South Africa, GDPR for Europe, and LGPD for Brazil.
