Social Engineering News: Phishing

Phishing Remains at Historic Highs; June 2021 saw 222,127 attacks. The third-worst month in APWG reporting history. These findings from the APGW 2021 Trends Report make it clear that phishing continues to be a serious threat for enterprises. Indeed, phishing is a social engineering attack vector that is one of the fastest growing security risks today. In view of this, our first edition of Social Engineering News focuses on phishing.

What is Phishing?

At Social-Engineer LLC, we define phishing as the “practice of sending emails appearing to be from reputable sources with the goal of influencing or gaining personal information.”
Image: https://mn.gov/mnit/media/blog/?id=38-246678

The following recent news stories show how criminals are successfully crafting phishing emails.

• As employees transition from remote to in person, some companies such as Google and Facebook are requiring proof of vaccination. As reported by the Washington Post, criminals are successfully using this as a ruse to phish employee credentials.

• Criminals quickly take advantage of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill passed by Congress. Posing as U.S. Transportation Department officials, they offer fake project bid opportunities to seduce companies into handing over Microsoft credentials.

• At least 10,000 Microsoft email users targeted in FedEx and DHL express phishing attacks. Both scams aim to steal email work credentials.

• Current trends show that phishing is a bigger threat than ransomware. In an article released by Security Brief Asia, the comment is made: “While large ransomware attacks certainly make news coverage, phishing attacks are more common and have increased significantly. The latest data shows a worldwide web laden with phishing websites.”

• UC San Diego Health sued over data breach that may have exposed records of 500,000 patients. The lawsuit seeks class-action status in a case where a phishing scam allowed access to a wide range of sensitive information.

Social-Engineer Phishing Service —Test, Educate, and Protect

The Social-Engineer Phishing Service (SEPS) is a fully managed program that measures and tracks how employees respond to email phishing attacks. The SEPS provides the following:

• Levelized emails
• Custom templates
• Tailored training based on failures
• Comprehensive reporting
• Phish notification feature

Image: Social-Engineer, LLC

Employees who understand the threat posed by phishing attacks are less likely to click malicious links and more likely to report suspicious activity. Please contact our team today for a quote.