Spear Phishing Takes Advantage of Your Employees’ Trust

One of the most dangerous attacks facing companies today is spear phishing. A spear phishing attack is one in which the sender of an email represents themselves as someone known and trusted by the user in order to gain access to sensitive or private information.

Spear phishing emails most often use social engineering techniques to gain access to the user’s trust, then betray that trust by asking for “misplaced” or “forgotten” information such as passwords, login credentials, or financial information.

A more recent approach taken by hackers is “whaling.” In a whaling attack, the unscrupulous sender masquerades as a C-level executive or board member and gives the email receiver account information in an attempt to coerce them to wire corporate funds into a fraudulent account.

Corporate training in the dangers of phishing attacks can only go so far. Despite an increase in the number of companies giving their employees training in avoiding these types of attack, with 30% of phishing emails being opened by employees, and 12% of the malicious payload within those emails successfully hitting the mark. The average cost of such attacks an organization is 1.2 million dollars.

2018 Data Breach Investigations Report, Verizon.

DuoCircle Link Click Protection Can Prevent Spear Phishing Attacks

Link Click Protection (a part of DuoCircle’s Advanced Threat Defense Suite) scans each URL against multiple URL reputation databases for the most up-to-date protection possible. This scan is run each time the link is clicked. Just because a site is safe the first time it is scanned doesn’t guarantee that it will be safe on subsequent clicks. If the link is suspicious, the user is warned to that effect and the site is blocked. Safe sites are opened normally, of course, to assure that no interruption to legitimate business occurs. Wholesale protection of this kind is the key to providing a much higher degree of email security over that which results from trying to identify particular attackers or individual phishing “signatures.”

With DuoCircle’s Link Click Protection, your organization will:

• Mitigate against the risk of phishing attacks, spear phishing threats, and whale phishing vulnerabilities without requiring any additional outlay of IT infrastructure or overhead moneys.
• Instantly and seamlessly protect users against attacks on any device anywhere, without any interruption of service.
• Control the security sevices easily through a single unified web-based console as a part of DuoCircle’s Advanced Threat Defense Suite.

Link Click Protection from DuoCircle Stops Spear Phishing Threats

It is important for organizations to realize that they are under attack, and the front line is not in the courtroom or media, but in their employees’ inboxes. DuoCircle’s Advanced Threat Defense Suite with Link Click Protection protects against phishing attacks by:

• Analyzing email headers, domain names, and message content for inconsistencies which may point to fraudulent email or the use of social engineering techniques.
• Scanning all incoming and delivered email each time a link is clicked and only opening safe websites, while reporting unsafe sites to the user.

Advanced Threat Defense offers world-class threat protection at a fraction of the cost of a legacy on-site solution. DuoCircle’s cloud based solution is secure and also virtually infinitely scalable.