In the past two years, phishing attacks have seen a steady rise and our experts predict that it’s only going to increase in the coming time. The staggering rise in indicates that there are more attacks happening due to ransomware. There has been a steep rise in ransomware attacks against various cities, huge organizations and government organizations across the globe. In order to break into local networks, hackers are creating fake campaigns to steal employee credentials.
Once inside the systems, their malware holds the local data hostage until the ransom amount is paid.
Cybercriminals have now shifted their attention to social engineering through various types of digital communications for successful injection of the malware. Yet, the most common way of infection of the ransomware is through phishing.
Evasive phishing tactics
Below mentioned are some evasive phishing tactics that would keep users and organizations around the world, safe from ransomware attacks.
Content Encryption –The content of the email and the attachment are both encrypted. This prevents detection from security solutions.
Inspection Blocking – In order to prevent certain connections from IP addresses and hosts from certain security providers, a blocklist is used.
HTML Character encoding – An HTML code is displayed correctly in the web browser but it ignores certain words that are flagged by security systems.
Phishing URL’s in attachments – Detection becomes difficult when the phishing links are hidden in the attachments rather than the email itself. Usually, such documents are used to target rival embassies and government offices and agencies.
Content Injection – Links are included in legitimate pages with vulnerabilities or apps that redirect users to phishing pages.
Conclusions
As long as users keep succumbing to the demands of the hacker, the threat of ransomware would always be persistent. Hence it is necessary for officials to focus on mitigation methods by protecting employees and users through regular training and better real-time security systems.
One of the most prominent solutions to staying away from Phishing attacks is to ensure that no links from unknown emails and text messages are clicked. Even though spam emails sometimes might pique our curiosity, it is advisable to not click such links that originate from an untrusted source.
An alternative solution is installing eScan Total Security Suite for Windows devices and Mobile Security for Android and iOS-enabled devices.
To read more, please check eScan Blog
