A Phishing email is a type of cybernetic threat whose main goal is to obtain sensitive information about the user, such as usernames, passwords, credit card details and more. In order to do this, the content of a phishing email often tries to disguise itself as a trustworthy entity such as a bank, the government’s site or a webpage of many major companies.
How does one protect themselves in the event of receiving a phishing email?
Here at DynaRisk we recommend a series of practices to avoid data breaches caused by phishing emails.
These practices include:
- Always checking the source of the email/sms or any other message that you’ve received
- Reading the content of the message carefully to check for any grammar mistakes, poor structure, strange email formatting or low quality images
- Not clicking any links inside the email. These usually take the user to a form in which the hacker (disguised as for example a bank account website) is asking for sensitive data and/or install malicious software which allows the attacker to gain access to your device/web account and more
- Never responding with any type of personal information such as credit card numbers, passwords, location, address, etc. Trustworthy companies never ask the user for this kind of information
- Training your detection skills by using phishing simulation to ensure that you can learn how to determine that an email is indeed a phishing email trying to extort information from you
In order to train your team to identify a phishing email, DynaRisk offers a Phishing Simulator – a feature which sends out fake phishing emails to your employees in order to get them familiar with the visuals of such an email so they can detect them in the future and react appropriately and don’t provide any personal information to the hackers. For more information on how to use our Phishing Simulator, please read the How can I use the Phishing Simulator to train my team? article.