The most effective way to take action against Phishing!

What is Phishing?

Phishing is a prevalent, effective, and simple method of cyber deception. It’s a crime to trick people into sharing personal and confidential information.

The term Phishing originates from the fact that it is similar to  fishing. The cybercriminal goes fishing in the vast ocean of the Internet after preparing an attractive bait and waits until someone falls for it. The letter Ph comes from the term  phreaking, a combination of the words phone and weird, a concept that consisted of low-tech attacks to experiment with the telephone system in the 1970s. This complements the definition of Phishing from Phreaking + Fishing.

Types of Phishing

Our realities have become increasingly virtual.  Everything is handled remotely:  banks, jobs, phones, payments. Phishing has therefore become a genuine concern, making security and information protection a high priority for companies.

• Phishing, the usual and common term, refers to receiving phishing emails or alarmist messages that call for immediate actions, such as clicking on an advertisement that takes you to fake websites.
• Spear Phishing is targeted at particular individuals. It is also known as personalized phishing.
• Whaling consists of phishing attacks targeting a specific high-value individual. It’s similar to Spear phishing but with much greedier targets.
• Vishing is a fraud that is carried out through telephone calls.
• Pharming is a technique that can redirect the victim to the spoofed version of a website compromising the DNS cache.

How to identify a Phishing email?

Some important characteristics that can help to identify phishing emails are:

1. The email comes from an unknown sender, and its content is unusual. It’s typically a captivating, remarkable opportunity that comes with a request for personal information or financial data.
2. Phishing emails are not commonly addressed to a specific recipient and usually ask for immediate action. It offers you, for example, time-limited packages, asking you to interact quickly to avoid losing them.
3. The email usually has mistyped links, since phishing attackers often recreate links to websites almost identical to the real ones. It may also have attachments that are not previewed and can only be downloaded. 

The good news is that ToogleBox offers Email Damage Control tools to react to phishing attacks once they are identified, using a simple and effective solution that allows deleting emails massively with just one click!

How to react and resolve Phishing attacks with ToogleBox

Google Workspace has sophisticated algorithms that make a previous analysis of the emails being received. Super Admins can create spam filters to generate barriers, as well as whitelists of approved domains or blocked senders. Similarly, content compliance, attachment compliance, and secure transport compliance (TSL) rules can be configured. But despite all these barriers, phishing attacks can still happen to penetrate Google Workspace domains.  All the proven rules and filters are useless in the face of this new social engineering attack. Solving an unbeaten phishing attack requires reactive analysis and a powerful damage control solution. And it's there when ToogleBox comes as a reactive and robust solution to solve this serious problem once it is detected.

The reactive analysis and damage control process begins when the Super Admin detects the existence of phishing emails on the domain. After inspecting the first suspicious emails, the Super Admin attempts to identify a typical phishing pattern in elements such as the sender, the subjects, the attachments, among others. ToogleBox inspects all mailboxes and creates a list of emails with the common pattern provided by the Super Admin and delivers a target list through a specialized UX (user experience). The Super Admin then validates the pattern through the specialized UX, allowing sorting and searching for email items in the target list. This process is iterated until the Super Admin concludes that the Phishing Pattern makes sense he triggers automatic mass deletion and problem solved! 

Later on, the Super Admin will be able to build new barriers in the administration console based on the identified phishing pattern, adding more spam filters, blocking new senders, or configuring updated attachment compliance to increase the security level.

If you recognize the seriousness of Phishing, have ever been a victim of it, or simply want to avoid it, share this article with your colleagues to learn about this relevant and crucial topic!