Proxies for Anti-phishing

Anti-phishing refers to specific actions aimed at preventing phishing attacks. These attacks are performed by fraudsters who pose as trusted individuals or organizations and contact people through various channels in an attempt to persuade them to take an action. Therefore, the main goal of anti-phishing is to identify harmful content and make sure attackers are denied access to sensitive data (e.g., bank account numbers, social security numbers).

While in the contemporary digital landscape there’s a wide variety of phishing attacks, the most common three are: email phishing, spear phishing, and whaling. Email phishing refers to attacks sent by fraudsters to any email address they can obtain. Spear phishing targets a specific group of people or an individual. These attacks are more sophisticated as criminals using such an approach already have some personal information about the victim that they include in their phishing emails. Finally, whaling is the most targeted type of phishing as it sends fraudulent messages to senior executives, such as CEOs, CFOs, COOs, etc.

A simple example of phishing would be when a criminal impersonates a brand, trusted partner, or internal employee and asks for access to company’s sensitive information (e.g., bank account numbers or payment processes) by sending a phishing email. The threat actor then uses the received details to send fraudulent invoices that closely mimic real ones, making it hard for individuals to detect phishing.