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 action. Therefore, the main goal is to identify harmful content and make sure attackers are denied access to sensitive data (e.g., bank account numbers, social security numbers, etc).

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 as it sends fraudulent messages to senior executives, such as CEOs, CFOs, COOs, etc.

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

The first step in protecting your business from phishing attacks is to educate your employees on how it works and train them about best practices. Next, you should implement anti-virus or cloud email security solutions to secure your network against malware and fraud. Additionally, you may want to deploy dedicated tools that are specifically designed to combat phishing.

If you would like to learn more about this topic, see this How to Avoid Phishing blog post.

Such tools are made with the sole purpose of guarding against phishing by detecting and blocking suspicious activities. These tools can range from web gateways that block access to known phishing websites to email scanners that analyze data of inbound emails in real time. Some of the tool examples include:

• Email filters

• Multi-factor authentication

• DNS filters

• Anti-virus software