Phishing The Facts

Phishing The Facts

• Research has found that 89% of all attacks are linked to financial motives
• The e-Mail phishing rate is 1 in every 1,846 e-mails
• Phishers main aim is to lure their victims into disclosing personal information – such as their names, credit card details and bank account numbers
• Phishers use bait in order to get their victims to disclose information. These ‘baits’ can be delivered via any mode of technology such as SMS, however they usually come via e-mail messages
• Research suggests that 95% of phishing e-mails claim to be from Amazon, eBay, or banks
• There are two types of phishing. These are regular-phishing attacks and spear-phishing attacks. Regular phishing is not targeted, and aims at tempting the victim to click on a link that will take the individual to a webpage asking for personal information and details. Spear-phishing is targeted and impersonates parts of an organisation in order to obtain sensitive and personal information
• Commonly used methods of phishing include look-alike URLs. Some of these are so good that individuals who know about phishing cannot notice them. Lisa Phifer, author at e-security planet states that individuals need to “keep browsers patched, use a filter, such as IE SmartScreen or Google Safe Browsing, and heed warnings”
• Phishing malware is rapidly growing more advanced at obtaining personal financial data. According to the Anti-Phishing Working Group “approximately 2% are now crimeware designed to steal data from specifically-targeted financial institution customers. Another one-third are data stealing and generic Trojans, designed to capture data from and/or remotely control a victim’s computer”.
• Around 59 million phishing e-mails are sent each day
• Individuals can recognise phishing in e-mail messages by the use of poor English. They can also look who the sender is and see if the e-mail address corresponds to this. In addition to this, they can look for grammatical errors in the body of the e-mail.
• The best defence against phishing attacks is to educate individuals on the warning signs and the types of programs they can use to limit phishing