Why Is Phishing On The Rise? Here’s How To Fight It
We live in a click-happy society.
Often we don’t think twice before clicking links to retrieve more information.
So, how can organisations learn to use links cautiously to avoid phishing risk?
Here’s some insight into why phishing is so prevalent, how you can drive employee awareness and the key benefits MPDR could bring to your organisation.
Why Is Phishing Increasing Exponentially?
Phishing is one of the primary threats facing organisations, with 96% of phishing attacks coming from emails. The reason why? Threat actors are getting better and better at duping victims.
The success of phishing relies on 2 factors:
- A valuable enough reward – the cyber criminal is looking for “payment” in the form of a ransom fee or data to sell on the dark web.
- The victim falling for it – social engineering tactics are more advanced than they’ve ever been, and often it’s hard to tell which emails are legitimate and which aren’t.
The ultimate defining factor? It costs cyber criminals almost nothing to execute, since emails are free to send.
With this in mind, it makes sense that phishing is growing in numbers.
5 Tips To Fight Phishing
Here’s how you and your employees can stay vigilant towards phishing and take action right now to eliminate risk.
- Seek Actionable Intelligence – the greater your knowledge of phishing campaigns and key tactics used, the more resilient you become as you know where to take action and why. This could be doing in-house research, or outsourcing Threat Intelligence.
- Act Imminently – As soon as phishing is identified, action must be taken to report the email and reduce the chance of it catching another employee out, before it gets out of hand.
- Educate Staff – Although investing in MPDR solutions offers a quicker, more accurate response to cyber attacks, building employee awareness and offering phishing simulation tasks helps keep everyone “in the know”.
- Safeguard Your Accounts – Use multi-factor authentication, protect your email address from public domains and update your privacy settings – these will all help protect employees from phishing via login credentials.
- Follow Best Practices – It’s easy to ignore all the online chatter about what you should or shouldn’t do, but some of it is worth paying attention to. NCSC promote four “layers” which are great for building your security defences – see here.
How Could MPDR Support Your Security Posture?
Whilst the 5 tips above are influential in making immediate change to fight phishing, a growing number of organisations are investing in Managed Phishing Detection & Response (MPDR) services.
Unlike focusing primarily on employee education, outsourcing MPDR adds an extra protective layer of expertise, offering quick identification and mitigation of phishing attacks on a 24/7 basis, removing the stress of in-house phishing alerts.
Discover more about the emerging need for MPDR and top benefits here.
Overall, fighting phishing doesn’t only involve employee education or burdening your security team with alerts. To effectively protect your employee ecosystem, consider MPDR, threat analysis and employee awareness campaigns simultaneously. This gives your organisation the highest chance of tackling those phish quickly, expertly and with precision.
Download Talion’s Ultimate Phishing Guide for key trending insight.
