Education has, and always will be the best defensive against fraudulent emails. Educating you and your employees on what the warning signs are in fake emails is best practice when going up against cyber-criminals.

Attackers will go after the most vulnerable element in a company – your employees. It is important that your organizations personnel learn what the latest trends are in phishing, because you are only as strong as your weakest link.

Infosecurity Magazine gave us an important run-down on what happened at The European Information Security Summit (TEISS) in 2018. Lesley Marjoribanks, head of ethical phishing at the Royal Bank of Scotland, informed us on what trends are likely to appear in the future.

Ransomware will still be one of the biggest threats. Cybersecurity Ventures estimated that ransomware damages will exceed $11.5 billion in 2019. Ransomware is when a cyber-criminal gains access to your computer and data by you falling victim to one of their phishing emails. When you click on one of their fake links or download their attachments, it installs dangerous software on your computer, holding your data hostage. The cyber-criminal will then ask for a payment in return for your data, holding it for ransom, hence the name ransomware.

Long-term phishing is another element we will see. This means attackers are going to spend even more time doing their research to impersonate top executives.

SC Media also chimed in and published a report with the top 5 phishing trends. In agreeance with Infosecurity Magazine, they believe social media attacks are going to become more popular.

LinkedIn is one platform that will probably see an increase in attacks. This is because more and more businesses are turning to this platform to reach out to others for marketing or hiring efforts.

But do not forget about the other platforms! Twitter and Facebook are important sites that phishing attacks are likely to happen on as well. It is reported that attackers are likely to make fake accounts posing to be customer service representatives from big companies and banks- in turn people will look to them for help.

Lastly, it is important to look out for “smishing”. Smishing is the new trend of SMS phishing, meaning attacks will be sent out via text message. Most people do not know that phishing attacks can be sent out via text, so we can expect a high number of users falling victim to this.

Reading blogs such as this, or other related ones is a great way to learn about the newest developments in the world of phishing. Making sure you and your employees are at least aware that these emails are circulating around out there and knowing some of the key features to look out for can save your organization countless time and money.

Education will always be the best defensive against cyber-criminals. Integrated Systems is working to educate as many people as we can. We offer a comprehensive computer-based training (CBT) program and a phishing simulator that will walk you and each of your employees through what to look out for and why and show you just how vulnerable your organization is to phishing emails. If you would like more information on our CBT program or our phishing simulation please email us at sales@integratednet.com, or give us a call at (585) 924-8670.