A Brief Note On Phishing Attacks And Techniques

According to the Federal Trade Commission Identity theft is the fastest growing crime in the United States of America. They estimated that 10 million people a year are victimized by the crime which comes out to about 19 people per minute are becoming victims of this crime. Given these extremely worrying statistics it has never been more important to be informed about the crime of identity theft and how to avoid it in your daily life especially as more schemes and ways to unknowingly forfeit your information are introduced with the prevalence of the World Wide Web (www, w3). More than just knowledge of the crime of identity theft it is also important to know what protections you can set to help protect your information. Also, given the amount of businesses and organizations, and the various vulnerabilities that their systems may have, that must have access and know significant information about your life it is also invaluable to understand how to recover from your information being lost. This paper will be used to inform about this growing crime including what identity theft is and the different types that exist, what information is most important to protect, what you can do to avoid it, how to recover from it and what that may entail, and how this applies to the field of computer science and what should be looked for when building systems, and different kinds of attacks that can happen.

First of all, phishing attack is a kind of social engineering, where the attacker try to find out your login name and password simply by requesting. They usually pretends to be an authority figure, such as banking system, with a sense of urgency (for example if you don’t send your password, your account could potentially be froze). It is like an impersonation and deceit.

As value customers of the Anthem, Inc. we believe it is important to keep each one of you informed of any incident that might affect your business with us. Your privacy and security is our priority for the reason Anthem, Inc. would like to inform our customers of a recent phishing attack. Unfortunately, we have experienced similar attacks in the past which led many of the employees and customers’ data exposed to hackers. Even though this is a serious matter for the company and the customers it is important for us to make our customers aware that phishing attacks are common and they cause huge losses to both the customers and the companies (Wright et al., 2014). Our most recent attack took place on April 2014 and it affected about 80 million identifiable data stolen via phishing emails. The

In today’s IT world every organization has a responsibility to protect the information and sensitive data they have. Protecting data is not only responsibility of security and IT staff but every individual is involved in protecting the information. The risks to information security are not digital only, but it involves technology, people and process that an organization may have. These threats may represent the problems that are associated to complex and expensive solution, but doing nothing about these risks is not the solution.

Dhamija, R., Tygar, J. D., & Hearst, M. (2006, April). Why phishing works. InProceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems (pp. 581-590). ACM.

In legal terms, phishing is an attempt to acquire personal information by masquerading as a trustworthy entity through an electronic communication. First Anti-Phishing Act was drafted in 2005 to regulate phishing attacks, which did not passed. However it

Recently, the company has been the subject of a data breach in which confidential files in the network have been accessed by an unknown party. Upon investigation we have found that a supervisor that handles customer complaints received an e-mail from what appeared to have been a customer with a complaint regarding an error on the website. Upon investigation he found no such error, but did find that the return address did not exist. It is very likely the company has become the victim of one or more social engineers seeking to exfiltrate data from the company. It is believed that that source of the attack was a spear phishing campaign via the e-mail sent to the supervisor that oversees customer complaints. While supervisor e-mails are not normally

Risk management is a key part of information security. Specific to the phishing attack protection, there are two major effects: fixing the missing controls of the system to reduce the vulnerabilities which may be used by phishing; Implement incident response policy to prevent and reduce further damage in case phishing attack successes.

There are twelve major ways technology threatens your online policy today. The first of these threats is phishing. According to Riva Richmond, phishing is a ploy to gain personal information that will help people to steal your identity. Hackers will send you fake e-mails that

Phishers with identity theft on their minds can do a whole lot of damage with seemingly small amounts of information. When you fill out a credit card application, for example, you typically need a handful of things: your Social Security number, your current address and your occupation, to name a few. Those types of things are easy to obtain once a phisher has gained access to one of your online accounts. Before you know it, a bunch of credit cards with your name on them could be sent out into the wrong hands.

Through the recent cyber attacks by China and due to the increase in the phishing attacks by the cyber terrorists, the country’s security and the privacy of the rational citizens or the common man of India is at stake

One of the most pressing threats to Information Security Officers and everyone involved in the security field is the exploitation of ones’ email system. Since almost everyone on a network utilizes this service and a lot of the vulnerability comes from the individual end user, the threat is quite expansive. One of the main ways email systems are compromised and lead to data leakages are user’s susceptibility to falling victim to phishing attacks which then introduce malware to a system. According to APWG’s report, “’Business email compromise’ (or BEC) scams became a major problem in 2015” and sites associated with phishing have risen to as high as 88,976 as of August 2015.[1] In addition, in a survey of hundreds of information security professionals, 85% reported being the victim of a phishing attack, where emails personalized with first names, or last names, had 19% and 17% higher click rates, respectively, than those without personalization.[5] To get a better picture of just how vulnerable companies are to this threat, back in December of 2015, JPMorgan, after recently falling victim to a breach of their own, was able to convince 20% of its own staff to open a fake phishing email as part of an internal security vulnerability assessment.[2] Predicted annual costs of phishing have been estimated to range from $208,174 when malware is contained in an email, $1,020,705 when credential compromises are not contained

Phishing has become one of the most successful methods cyber attackers use for hacking an organization. It has become effective because it targets the weakest link, people. Cyber attackers understand that the easiest way to hack into an organization, infecting someone’s computer or gain someone’s password is to simply ask. Phishing works by sending an email to millions of people pretending to be something they know or trust, such as a well-known bank, online store, or government organization. The attackers do not have a specific target in mind nor do they now exactly who will fall victim, they simply know the more phishing emails they send out, the more people they can fool. Their goal is to trick people into providing the phishers with their private information. 2015 saw an increase of 23% of users opening phishing messages and 11% of users click on the attachment (Verizon, 2015). Further, phishing still remains as one of the top two concerns that organizations have and the numbers are growing. Since 2014 phishing concerns by the organizations have been increasing every year (Cyber Edge, 2016) and more money is put invested in technological means. Many organizations use technical means such as filtering messages, detection of fraudulent websites, and developing anti-phishing warning systems (Egelman et al. 2008). However technical means are incapable of removing the threat of phishing (Abbasi et al. 2012; Dhamija et al. 2006) because an organizations weakest link, the

The increasing volume and sophistication of cyber security threats including targeted data theft, phishing scams and other online vulnerabilities demand that we remain vigilant about securing our systems and information.

With the beginning of internet, various online attacks have been increased and among them, the most popular attack is phishing. Phishing is an online security attack where the hacker targets in achieving sensitive information like passwords, credit card information etc. from the users by making them to believe what they see is what it is. It is the combination of social engineering and technical methods to convince the user to reveal their personal data. The paper discusses about the Phishing social engineering attack theoretically and their issues in the life of human Beings. At the same time this paper also provides different techniques to detect these attacks so that they can be easily dealt with in case one of them occurs. The paper gives a thorough survey of various Phishing attacks along with their preventive measures.