Phishing Attacks Continue to Soar!

What is Phishing?

Phishing is the practice of sending fraudulent emails to people in order to receive personal information.  This malicious practice will not stop.  Everyone reading this email has received one and very possibly have a few in the spam folder now.  The attached image highlights the continuing trend towards cyber crime.  The increase and magnitude of efforts would not continue if they were not successful.

We can see from a Webroot report in 2016 that there were more than 13,000 phishing websites created daily.  This amount then increased the following year to 46,000 webpages created a day. This is nearly tripple the amount of pages craeted in just one year!

While the increase can be partially attributed to the quickness in which these sites are shutdown (4-6 hours), the rise is undoubtly a result of the successful phishing attacks.  For hackers, it becomes a numbers game of how many attacks can they can produce.   The more attacks means the more opportunities they have towards finding a succeptible victim.

Now what?  How can we protect ourselves?  Unfortunately there is not a single solution that will eliminate attacks from coming in, however, there are ways to reduce the risk to levels that are acceptable.

Defense in Depth:

A strong security solution should include technology that blocks access to phishing URLS and also that prevent the delivery of malicious emails.  There is nothing more valuable to cyber defense than regular training provided to employees on how to identify phishing attacks.  A defense in depth is the best way to keep personal and company data secure. Layring technology security solutions together provide the best defense against attacks.

To learn more about how TLC Tech manages security for our partners check out our Network Security page or give us a call at  (916) 441-3838.

To learn more about Hippa and the image please visit Hippa Journal