How to Recognize and Respond to Phishing Attacks
As cyber threats continue to evolve, phishing remains one of the most damaging and common ways that criminals gain access to sensitive information. Understanding how to recognize and respond to phishing attacks is critical to your organization’s cybersecurity and financial stability.
Phishing uses a variety of tactics to trick the unsuspecting, including impersonating trusted organizations, coworkers and financial institutions. Attackers often use a sense of urgency and threats to make their requests for personal data seem legitimate. They also conceal malicious links and attachments in places where people aren’t as discerning, such as their email inboxes.
To target individuals, scammers use a process called spear phishing to gather public information about their targets, such as social media profiles, corporate websites and other sources. This allows attackers to tailor their messages and make them more likely to elicit a response. Spear phishing can be more difficult to detect than mass phishing, as it’s more targeted.
Scammers can also reach out to their targets through social media platforms, such as Facebook Messenger, LinkedIn InMail and Twitter DMs (now known as X). These types of attacks are called vishing and SMiShing.
Social media phishing can be particularly damaging, as attackers are able to leverage the trust of users’ friends and followers. For example, an attack targeting Special Olympics New York was crafted with the goal of gaining access to the organization’s 67,000 donors by posing as a member of their team.