Knowing how to best protect your business from common phishing attacks can save you a lot of stress and time in the long run. At Express Computers, we understand how important it is for you to ensure the safety of your company’s data. That is why our team has put together a list of some of the most common types of phishing attacks and how to protect your business from them.
6 Common Types of Phishing Attacks
As phishing attacks continue to become more frequent and sophisticated, it is important for business owners to learn about the significant threat these attacks pose, how to spot them, and how to protect their business information from them. Some of the most common types of phishing attacks include:
1. Whale Phishing
Whale phishing, also known as CEO fraud, is designed to steal login credentials from your business’ executives. Stealing this information allows fraudsters to impersonate the executive, abusing their email by authorizing fraudulent financial transactions.
2. Spear Phishing
Spear phishing takes a personalized approach to scamming your information. For this type of phishing, fraudsters will customize their emails with your name, position, company, work phone number, or other personal information that they can find on line in order to lure you into clicking on a malicious URL or email attachment.
3. Deceptive Phishing
The most common type of phishing attack is deceptive phishing in which a fraudster impersonates a legitimate company in order to steal your personal information or login credentials. Clicking on the link in the email you receive will send you to a fraudulent website that looks almost identical to the official URL of the legitimate company.
4. Dropbox Phishing
In some cases, fraudsters will specialize their attack emails to focus on an individual company or service, such as Dropbox. Fraudsters who use this type of phishing scam are often looking to capitalize on a platform’s popularity by luring you into entering your login credentials on a fake site.
5. Google Docs Phishing
Much like with Dropbox phishing, fraudsters can also target Google Drive documents, spreadsheets, presentations, photos, and websites. In most cases, fraudsters will create a web page that looks similar to the Google account login in order to steal user credentials.
6. Pharming
Unlike more traditional phishing scams, pharming scams target a DNS server by changing the IP address associated with a website name. This means that fraudsters can choose to redirect users to a malicious website, even if the correct website name is typed into the browser.
How to Protect Your Business from Phishing Attacks
Since phishing attacks are a common concern business have to face on a daily basis, it is important to know how to best protect your business. To help protect your business from these common phishing scams, you should:
- Educate your employees and executives
- Keep all software up to date
- Backup and encrypt company data
- Consider cybersecurity insurance
- Utilize IT security tools
If you would like to learn more about common phishing attacks and how to protect your business, or if you are interested in one of our services (data protection, IT services, or software development), please contact Express Computers at 604-888-7904 or request a consultation online.
