Phishing: What is it and how does it affect your company?

What is phishing and how does it effect your business?
Spain was one of the countries with the most phishing attacks in 2019. Many businesses and individuals have been victims of cyberattacks via email, resulting in the theft of private information and the loss of credentials and passwords.

To give you a sense of how serious the problem is, this report from Levante claims that phishing attempts in Spain have climbed by 640 percent, while IT Reseller claims that more than half of firms have experienced a successful phishing attack in 2019.

The main source of attacks is a lack of an efficient anti-phishing system. One of a company’s key tasks is to maintain the security of its employees and customers, as well as to prevent the loss of personal and sensitive data. As a result, you should take every precaution to avoid any form of vulnerability or security breach in your system.

What is phishing?

The word “phishing” is derived from the Spanish word “pescar” or “picar.” Phishing is a type of cyber-attack that uses email to fool users into taking a specific action, such as clicking on a link to download an infected file or attempting to steal credentials by diverting them to an illicit website with a false form, hence the name “phishing.”

Phishing is a method of obtaining confidential or sensitive information that can compromise a company, usually with the goal of intercepting communications and obtaining a financial benefit (for example, changing an invoice’s account number) or attempting to infect users’ computers in order to gain access to resources or infect the computer with a virus (either malware or ransomware).

To that aim, phishing emails are crafted to look like commercial or educational emails in order to fool users.

How to avoid a phishing attack inside your company?

One of the most important steps you can take in your organization to prevent phishing attacks and maintain the security of your staff and customers is to use an anti-phishing solution. However, there is another thing to consider, which might also be a contributing factor to successful phishing attempts. Your staff, or the human component.

In order to protect the security of your clients and your business, your staff must be trained to spot any phishing attack and avoid taking any action that could compromise the company’s information and data.

How do we help you at ESED?

As experts in cybersecurity services, we at ESED have created ESED Defensive, an active defense plan built on three pillars to combat any sort of cyberattack: ESED Attack, which entails launching controlled attacks to find and fix vulnerabilities and breaches in your security system; ESED Control, which entails working on information encryption to ensure its complete security; and ESED Training, which entails training your team on how to detect cyberattacks.

Additionally, ESED has created an anti-phishing ebook that contains all you need to protect your organization, employees, and consumers.