Phishing is a type of social engineering attack in which cybercriminals trick victims into sharing sensitive information or installing malware. Phishing is a type of social engineering attack often used to steal user data, including login credentials and credit card numbers. Phishing scams are a form of “social engineering” in which an attacker tries to trick you into giving them your credentials or access to your system. Phishing scams are often the “tip of the spear” or the first part of an attack to achieve a goal.
In cyber security, phishing is a general term for the method hackers and other potential infiltrators use in order to acquire money and personal information from users. The most common phishing example is a spam email, and the classic example of this is the dispossessed Nigerian Prince scam.
There are many types of attacks that start with a phishing campaign. There are also many types of attacks known as spear phishing that target specific organizations or individuals. When attackers try to craft a message to address a specific person, this is known as spear phishing. Spear phishing attacks typically use collected information about the victim to more effectively present the message as genuine.
Phishing vs. Spear Phishing
Unlike regular phishing attacks, where hackers use a wide network to attract as many potential victims as possible, spear phishing attacks are more targeted. In addition, spear-phishing attacks can spread malware to take over computers, linking them into huge networks called botnets that can be used for denial-of-service attacks.
Phishing is when attackers send malicious emails designed to trick people into being scammed. Phishing attacks don’t just rely on emailing victims with the hope that they will click on a malicious link or open a malicious attachment.
Phishing attacks use malicious emails or websites (by clicking on a link) to collect personal and financial information or infect your computer with malware and viruses. As with spam, these types of phishing emails are designed to convince the victim to infect their computer with malware. Most types of phishing use some form of technical deception to make a link in an email (and the fake website it leads to) look like it belongs to a fake organization.
Emails Are a Prime Phishing Tool
As with larger phishing campaigns, emails may contain malicious links or attachments. Attackers typically use phishing emails to distribute malicious links or attachments that can perform various functions. First, attackers will go to great lengths to develop phishing messages that mimic real emails from a fake organization.
The attacker will take the time and take care of creating the email for the person, usually because of the access they have. Phishing can go to the other extreme, where the email is literally targeted at a person. In other cases, attackers can send soft-targeted emails to someone who plays a specific role in the organization, even if they don’t know anything about them. Attackers forge their email address to make it look like it came from someone else, create fake websites that look like the ones the victim trusts, and use extraneous character sets to hide URLs.
Once victims open a phishing email or text message and click on a malicious link, they are redirected to a fake website that matches the legitimate website. As we’ve pointed out, sometimes phishing emails aren’t targeted at all; emails are sent to millions of potential victims in an attempt to lure them into fake versions of very popular websites.
Mostly, cybercriminals use malicious emails that appear to be from trusted senders to spoof, but sometimes they use other tactics as described below. Criminals who use phishing tactics succeed because they carefully hide behind emails and websites familiar to their target victims.
How Phishers Get Their Start and Ends
Once the scammers have installed a phishing kit on their servers and purchased a domain name for their phishing site, they can start sending emails to their targets.
In a phishing scam, an attacker or “phisher” pretends to be an institution or person you trust by sending you fake messages claiming to be from that trusted party. In modern phishing attacks, threat actors use skilled human social interactions to steal or compromise confidential information about an organization or its computer systems.
Phishing is a type of cybercrime in which someone posing as a legitimate institution contacts one or more victims via email, phone call or text message in order to trick people into providing sensitive information such as personal information, banking details and data. Security, credit cards and passwords. Phishing occurs when an attacker pretends to be a trusted person to trick a victim into opening an email, instant message, or text message.
Although spear phishing is often used to obtain sensitive data, cybercriminals can also use it to install malware on the target computer. Phishing is often used to gain a foothold on corporate or government networks as part of a larger attack such as the Advanced Persistent Threat Event (APT). Phishing Phishing Emails, advertisements and/or other types of communications that attempt to fraudulently obtain personal information and/or install malware on the victim by masquerading as a trustworthy organization or person.
Alternative Forms of Phishing
In addition to email and website phishing, there is phishing (voice phishing), phishing (phishing via text messages), and many other phishing methods that cybercriminals keep inventing. Phishing is a cyber attack that collects sensitive information, such as login credentials, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, or other financial information, by pretending to be a legitimate website or email address.
It is also personal information, such as social security numbers, phone numbers, and social networks. Media account details are a common target for identity theft cybercriminals. Phishing emails may also contain infected attachments that install malware such as ransomware A or gain unauthorized access to A’s sensitive data, resulting in A’s data exposure.
Threat Group-4127 (Fancy Bear) used spear-phishing tactics to attack email accounts associated with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. A Lithuanian hacker attacked specific employees of each company with phishing emails to gain access to their computers and collect the information needed to launch the attack. .