Can a Bird Eye View on Phishing Emails Reduce it Potentially?

On April 16, Google revealed in a report that more than 18 million daily malware and phishing emails related to COVID-19 were being sent to exploit people’s fear. Hackers are taking full advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic. They have designed COVID-19 theme-based phishing emails to exploit sensitive information of individuals, employees, and many others.

In such emails, they are offering fake healthcare updates and prevention methods. Due to curiosity in people to know about it more in detail, they click on fake offers delivered in such emails without any judgment. Consequently, It results in thousands of incidents like data breaches.

What is a phishing email?

It is an authentic look-alike email or a fake email. It is usually designed to lure innocent people. Hackers deploy such emails in business communication with an intention to fool employees. With this, they can take access to their personal information like usernames and passwords.

The authenticity of email can be determined with the domain associated with it. And, fake emails are usually associated with the duplicate domain of the original one. Here are the points to know and recognize about phishing emails.

Example of Phishing Email

Hackers show their concern for users on the name of the social media accounts like your account has been temporarily suspended. To re-access it, click on the below link like the sign in. But in reality, such sign-in links are designed with a purpose to redirect users on the malicious account login page. This malicious account webpage looks-alike the original social media account web page one.

How Phishing Emails Impact on Businesses?

An organization’s intellectual property like designs, strategies, and policies can breach with a response to a phishing email innocently. Because Hackers can also send it on the name of the CEO of your company and is generally termed as CEO fraud. An employee with a response to it innocently will fill out company policies, strategies, and business plans within such an email and send it back to the duplicate CEO email account or impersonate account on the name of the CEO. This can also breach companies’ confidentiality of customer data. In the end, it will downgrade the reputation of the business in the market.

Web pages associated with phishing emails have fake functions that look-alike the original one. But on clicking it, such functions do not work.

• Fake emails have mimicked the domain of the original one.
• Fake emails don’t use SSL or secure socket layer certificates.
• They either tried to lure or exploit innocent individuals like employees, customers, and many more.
• They often misspelled and can have poor content.

Tips to Stop Phishing Emails in Organizations:

• Implement a phishing tool that will automatically identify it and mark it as junk or spam mail.
• Security awareness training is one of the practices to create awareness among employees about it.
• Implement a protocol like dMarc which helps in identifying and filtering phishing emails.
• Implement security policies and standards.
• Hire a security instructor in the organization.

In the end, to mitigate the impact of phishing emails in organizations, they need to implement updated tools, techniques, and security policies.