Overview#
Phishing (
Spear-Phishing) is a
Social Engineering Attack to obtain
data including
Sensitive Data such as
usernames,
passwords, and
Payment Card details (and, indirectly,
money), often for
malicious reasons, by disguising as a trustworthy
entity in an
Telecommunications like
Email.
Phishing is an example of Social Engineering Attack used to deceive users and exploits weaknesses in current Website security.
Phishing typically directs users to enter personal data at a fake website, the look and feel of which are almost identical to the legitimate one. Communications purporting to be from social web sites, auction sites, banks, online payment processors or IT administrators are often used to lure victims. Phishing emails may contain links to websites that are infected with malware.
Phishing may involve use of a HTML link to Malicious Website which then deploys Malicious Software
Phishing may use Punycode so HTML links appear to be reputable Organizational Entity
More than 2/3 of the incidents in
2015 involved Phishing (
Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report).
One-Time passwords and other Multi-Factor Authentication help against your account being used to perform Phishing but not from you being the subject of Phishing
Phishing leads to other Attacks#
Phishing is often just the entry point to more
attacks. For
example, To obtain a perform such
attacks like
pass-the-hash or
pass-the-ticket, the
attacker needs
credentials of a
user to get in the door.
One trick that
bad guys use a lot is called
CEO Fraud. CEO Fraud involves a scam in which
cybercriminals impersonate executives in order to fool an
employee into executing unauthorized wire transfers, or sending out confidential
Sensitive Data. A sense of urgency is usually employed, pressuring the victim to act before thinking. According to
FBI statistics, CEO fraud is now a $12 billion scam.
There might be more information for this subject on one of the following:
- - Phishing
- based on information obtained 2017-05-05-