Protect Your Company From Phishing Attacks With Layered Mitigation
Phishing is the cyber attack of choice for attackers looking to steal personal information or privileged access. These attacks often involve creating a false sense of urgency to overcome people’s better judgement and trick them into clicking links or downloading attachments. Attackers can impersonate organizations you trust like banks and social media platforms to lure victims into revealing passwords or account numbers. They can also steal confidential company data like sales pipelines, customer lists or project plans. More sophisticated attacks can be targeted to specific employees, like executives in your company, to steal funds or critical data. This type of attack is known as business email compromise (BEC).
Effective layered mitigations can keep many types of phishing attacks at bay. Companies can supplement employee training and company policies with security tools that detect phishing messages in the wild. They can also encourage a culture of reporting phishing attempts, whether they’re successful or not, to limit damage and quickly isolate the attack.
The first thing you should do if you think you’ve been the victim of a phishing attack is to kill the connection with your network. Unplug your ethernet cable or switch off Wi-Fi to ensure the malware you just downloaded can’t communicate with attackers. Then, change your password on any compromised accounts and run a security scan on your device to remove any detected threats. After that, make sure to reboot your device and use a different internet connection.