In this era where companies have advanced towards working majorly over the internet and utilizing emails heavily, the businesses have simplified but the frauds are more common nowadays.
The companies must keep their workforce aware of every type of cybercrimes that are made in the name of company employees and senior corporates, and save them from humongous wealth losses.
This article aims at mentioning the 5 most common phishing attacks that mostly target corporate workers.
CEO Fraud
The most common type of phishing attack includes CEO frauds, also known as Business Email Compromise (BEC). The most prone targets to these attacks are the lower-level employees of an enterprise.
The fraudsters compose emails and pretend to be the CEO of a company. These emails contain clauses that ask for the transfer of funds to the sender’s bank account and are then sent in bulk to the lower-level employees, in an attempt to fool them to have received a bank transfer message directly from the CEO.
Spear Phishing
91% of cybercrimes start from sending emails that include hazardous links and installing malware into the systems, in an attempt to steal away all the confidential information, access other networks, and hack away all the account details present in the systems. These attacks are known as spear-phishing attacks.
Sadly, the traditional security methods might miss these kinds of emails, and may not be able to filter them up as spam mails. These emails are targeted at specific individuals of an organization.
Whaling
Whaling, as the name hints, is the phishing act by targeting the higher authority people of an organization, like the CEO, CFO, etc. These attacks are intended to extract out higher-level confidential enterprise data and information from the senior executives of the company.
These techniques do not utilize malicious links sent via emails to senior corporates. Instead, whaling uses tax return tactics, that can avail out important credentials, such as name, address, bank account details, etc.
Forbes quotes that since 2013, 78,617 companies ended up in $12 billion losses, through the senior executives being manipulated by whaling fraudsters.
Smishing and Vishing
SMS phishing (Smishing) and Voice Phishing (Vishing) are the sending malicious URL containing links, and phone calls that ask for secret bank details, and bank card information respectively.
Smishing exploits the present tendency of people to extensively involve in chats, reply instantly and easily trust everything that is shared via SMS, including website links.
Similarly, Vishing is tricking people over phone calls, and asking them to send all bank details and other confidential information.
HTTPS Phishing
HTTPS phishing is an all-time favorite phishing tactic used by fraudsters, by sending emails, that usually contain no formal body and only a malicious URL. The receivers are compelled to click the URLs or copy-paste the URLs on their device browsers.
The fraudsters use engineering tactics that can fool the receivers by influencing them to have received an email from legit people as senior executives, lower-level workers, and coworkers of the companies they are working with.