In this digital world, Email has become the most cost-effective channel for cybercrooks to make money. And that’s because it is very easy to gain financial value by siphoning someone else’s monetary and personal data via emails.
A survey conducted recently says that 57% of respondents admitted that their company has experienced a phishing attack in the past 12 months. And over 12% of them admit that their business could experience the risk in near future.
In most cases of email phishing attacks, hackers not only access personal data from emails but also succeed in inducing a malware on the device or into the business network which latest paves way for the hackers to steal further secrets of a company.
Security experts Fred Marshall says that the primary motivation for the hackers is to find sensitive info to use it for blackmail, identity fraud or access to financial accounts. In order to do so, the cyber crooks target individuals or organizations either randomly or for personal motivations like targeting someone like CEO who is believed to give them the greatest financial gain.
In some rare cases, hackers are state actors who are motivated to launch cyber attacks for political reasons. Like Hillary Clinton’s political campaign which was targeted in March 2016 by Russian intelligence, which later succeeded in influencing the US 2016 Polls to go in favor of the 45TH US President Donald Trump.
Security experts from ESET say that every industry is at risk of being cyber attacked. But from the past two years, most of the headlines on cybersecurity breaches were reported to companies operating in healthcare, human resource, and real estate industries.
So what’s the solution to prevent such attacks
1) Practicing qualitative cyber hygiene- Better to use company email accounts as they are loaded with security features on a default note. The next thing is to make your network private by isolating your servers with firewalls and avoiding public Wi-Fi’s.
2.) Implementing 2F authentication and choosing passwords in a wise way might also help.
3.) And the last but not the least is to create separate usernames and passwords for all accounts and avoid using individual names or parts of the name at any cost to create usernames.
4.) Educating the workforce on the latest happenings in the cyber landscape will also help
5.) Encrypting data and securing the networks with automated threat detection software will surely help.
6.) On the whole, being proactive rather than reactive will help you secure yourself from security breaches.
