Greetings everybody can hear and today we're going to be talking about phishing.
Phishing is one of the easiest forms of cyber attack for criminals to carry out and one
of the easiest to fall for.
It's also one that can provide everything hackers need to ransack their targets personal
and work accounts, usually carried out over email.
Although the scam has now spread beyond suspicious emails to phone calls, so called phishing
social media messaging services, aka smishing, and apps, a basic phishing attack attempts
to trick the target into doing what the scammer wants.
Let's dive right into what phishing is and how to avoid the Lord.
That term phishing with a pH is a spin on the word phishing, because criminals are dangling
a fake lure, a legitimate looking email, website or ad, hoping users will bite by providing
the information the criminals have requested, such as credit card numbers, account numbers,
passwords, usernames, and other valuable information.
And how do they do this?
Well, this is usually done by including a link on quote phishing messages that appear
to take you to a company's website to fill in your information.
But the website is a clever fake and the information you provide goes straight to the crooks behind
the scam phishing goes all the way back to last century.
Yet as digital technologies progress.
This technique continues to find new ways to exploit vulnerabilities.
Here are some of the most common phishing techniques nowadays, standard email phishing,
arguably the most widely known form of phishing, this attack is an attempt to steal sensitive
information via an email that appears to be from a legitimate organization.
It's not a targeted attack and can be conducted in mass malware phishing.
malware phishing uses the same techniques as email phishing, but this attack encourages
targets to click a link or download an attachment.
So some kind of virus can be installed on the device.
It's currently the most pervasive form of phishing attack, as it can not only compromise
some of your information but your whole computer spearfishing.
While most phishing attacks cast a wide net spear phishing is a highly targeted, well
researched attack generally focused at public personas, business executives and other lucrative
targets.
smishing SMS enabled phishing delivers malicious shortlinks to smartphone users, often disguised
as account notices, prize notifications and political messages.
Phishing vishing or voice phishing involves a malicious color purporting to be from tech
support a government agency or another organization and tries to extract personal information
such as banking or credit card information.
malvertising.
This type of phishing utilizes digital ad software to publish otherwise normal looking
ads with malicious code implanted within spotting the lore.
Even though there are numerous forms of phishing, the one that most people fall for is email
scamming, make no mistake, these attacks can be quite clever.
After all these types of phishing exists because they work.
Luckily for you, there are numerous warning signs that can help you detect this type of
phishing.
And what better way to learn them with an example.
Imagine this you receive an email from Amazon claiming your account has been locked.
You check the email and see that number one, the email is not addressed to your email address.
Number two, the header is addressed to dear customer instead of a personalized identifier
that includes your name.
Number three, a label that includes some text as exceeding the number of attempts allowed
appears.
For a lot of visual errors pop up, words are capitalized throughout the text punctuation
and the formatting is off five, the email tries to reassure you by encouraging you to
confirm this information using the link they provide.
Yet if you hover over the links on the page, another web address appears.
All of these elements are warning signs that the email must be a scam.
First of all, if you were truly being notified by a company that there was an issue with
your account, they would know your name and email already, then if you recall correctly,
you must know that you haven't attempted to sign into your Amazon account lately.
Thus, the information claiming that you exceeded the number of attempts allowed is false.
Yet this is where most people fall for the scam as they think somebody must be entering
into my account, I need to change my password.
Well, if you suspect this, don't click the links on the email and go to the web page
directly.
Here you can truly see if people attempt to enter your account and you can change your
password if you desire to.
As most of us only tend to skim through emails, visual errors, and false links are easier
to miss.
Still, it's important to be aware that if a message is asking for sensitive information,
we must be sure that we can trust it.
Reading the message thoroughly is a great way to spot these warning signs and avoid
being scammed becoming a shark now that you took the first step on learning what phishing
looks like, here's some things to do to avoid falling for them and encountering them in
the future.
Number one, don't click on that link.
As I said before, it's not advisable to click on a link in an email or instant message even
if you know the sender.
the bare minimum you should be doing is hovering over the link to see if the destination is
the correct one.
Some phishing attacks are fairly sophisticated, and the destination URL can look like a carbon
copy of the genuine site that's set up to record keystrokes or steal login or credit
card information.
If it's possible for you to go straight to the site through your search engine, rather
than click on the link then you should do so to get free anti phishing add ons. most
browsers nowadays will enable you to download add ons that spot the signs of a malicious
website or alert you about the known phishing sites, they're usually completely free, so
there's no reason not to have this installed on every device in your organization.
Number three, don't give your information to an unsecured site.
If the URL of the website doesn't start with HTTPS, or you can't see a closed padlock icon
next to the URL.
Don't enter any sensitive information or download files from that site.
Sites without security certificates may not be intended for phishing scams, but it's better
to be safe than sorry.
Number four, rotate passwords regularly.
If you've got online accounts, you should get in the habit of regularly rotating your
password so you prevent an attacker from gaining unlimited access your accounts may have been
compromised without you knowing so adding that extra layer of protection through password
rotation can prevent ongoing attacks and lockout potential attackers don't ignore those updates.
Receiving numerous update messages can be frustrating, and it can be tempting to put
them off or ignore them altogether.
Don't do this security patches and updates are released for a reason most commonly to
keep you up to date with modern cyber attack methods by patching holes in security.
If you don't update your browser, you could be at risk of phishing attacks through known
vulnerabilities that could have easily been avoided.
Number six, don't give out important information unless you must as a general rule of thumb,
unless you 100% trust the site you're on, you should not willingly give out your credit
card information.
Make sure if you have to provide your information that you verify the website is genuine, that
the company is real and that the site itself is secure.
So hopefully you found this video helpful if so please feel free to leave a thumbs up
as I always appreciate it.
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Oh, so cool.
But otherwise, thanks so much for watching.
Hope you have a great rest of your day.
Stay safe out there and I'll see you in the next video.