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BHHAAVIK Patel
BHHAAVIK Patel

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What are the Ways to Prevent an Organization from Phishing Attacks?

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Your company might be at risk of compromising valuable data to unknown sources online. The sad part is, you might not even know about it. There are plenty of websites claiming to give you the right anti-phishing solutions for your company. But not all of them are reliable. We are here to provide you with the latest prevention measures to stop phishing attacks for your organization.

Phishing: What exactly is it?

Before we move into how you can fix the problem, let’s first understand what phishing is and why it’s challenging to combat? Phishing is an illicit act executed by a hacker to steal sensitive information through email or communication sources. For instance, users clicking on a link, accessing a malicious file, or website redirection to steal credentials are standard methods to generate phishing attacks.

With the technology going into the future and interconnectivity becoming more accessible, cybersecurity risks are at an all-time high. What’s scary is that it can cost a company millions of dollars in a flash. Let alone the data breaches. Yes, phishing attacks can be deadly. Within time, you need to put the right phishing attack prevention measures into place to stop it.

Phishing Has Evolved Over Time

Most phishing attacks are made via pretending to be genuine-looking emails. The subject lines and content may vary, but these emails display a solid emotion to make the user click or download something or the other.

In 2021, phishing attacks target a whole lot of communication apps and productivity services. They most likely rely on social networking and cloud-based services to drop their virus into users’ systems. These attacks are most common in regularly used devices and platforms.

Akamai report says, “Facebook, Slack, Microsoft Resources, Dropbox, and Google Docs are the first point of penetration into organizations for criminals online.” No service on the web is immune to phishing attacks. That’s a sad reality of our online space today.

The chances are you might even have tried implementing anti-phishing systems to protect your company. Most often, it doesn’t work. Because the hackers are constantly updating their ways to attack business systems and steal data, the need of the hour is to give this one more try to learn the best practices available to stop such attacks.

Here are some of the best-known methods to stop phishing attacks for your organization. Let’s get started.

4 Ways to Protect Your Company From Phishing Attacks

1. Email Filtering

A Secure Email Gateway should be your topmost priority to defend against online attacks.

Email gateways act as the first line of defense to filter out malicious emails and threats and rule them out from user inboxes. A reliable email gateway will thwart away 99.99% of spam emails, malicious links, and files. What this means is it can stop users from receiving fraudulent emails in the first place.

Email gateways help identify compromised accounts and also protect your business emails against such attempts. They can stop your funds from being shared on spam emails of the other companies you work with.

Using an email gateway for your organization is extremely important, be it any size. Go for affordable, easy to use and highly secure email gateways to stop malicious attacks.

2. Phishing Protection Inside Your Email Inbox

After a phishing email is inside your email inbox or an account has already been affected, it can put your admin team at a grueling task for a while. What you need here is a Post-Delivery Protection platform to evade such high-risk threats.

Post-Delivery Protection platforms use AI and machine learning-based algorithms to safeguard organizations from such threats. These algorithms identify the attributes of phishing emails and analyze their behavior with the help of antivirus engines to track such hostile emails. The system then displays the warning pop-ups on these emails, making users aware of the harm it can cause to business systems. It then removes such emails from the organizations’ network completely.

Post-Delivery Protection systems serve as a great help to organizations that deal with high-value and sensitive data. It is one of the most reliable solutions for solid protection against all variants of phishing attacks.

Using them with a Secure Email Gateway adds multi-layer security for your enterprise. Their integration is easy and can prove to be a high-value solution.

3. Website Filtering

Web filtering is another excellent method to stop attackers from stealing user information and accessing company websites. It often works as a web proxy or filters out using DNS. What these filters do is sort web pages into different classes and use antivirus algorithms to scan and detect threats.

Your organization can then block these harmful threats and put restoration policies in place. This not only stops users from accessing any phishing pages but also protects their accounts and financial details.

NOTE: Complex web filtering solutions also use machine learning algorithms to detect and stop phishing attacks.

4. Simulated Phishing Attack Tests

Carrying out phishing attacks simulation can be a great way to make your employees aware of the threats. This helps admins to know the number of risks they might face from phishing and direct proper training as needed.

You can find many vendors who can source many simulated email campaigns and send them out to your employees. These vendors also offer security awareness training programs to train your employees against such phishing emails.

The #1 phishing simulation platform comes with phishing simulation templates that you can customize to make it more relevant for your business. You can customize almost all page sections - text, call-to-action, images, and a lot more. It can either make it more challenging or super easy to identify phishing emails. Admins can personalize the landing page to alert users if they have been victims of the simulated phishing attacks.

This can help your employees who struggle to identify phishing threats. Making everyone familiar with your organization can be a pivotal factor in stopping such attacks.

Conclusion

Protecting your company against malicious attacks requires intense cybersecurity awareness training. Along with that, you need to keep your systems ready to detect and thwart any such attacks right away. Taking the help of AI-based systems can boost your overall fight to keep phishing attacks at bay.

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