More than 60% of all breaches include phishing followed by stolen credentials.

Source: 2022 Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report

Can you identify a phishing attempt?

What is phishing?

Phishing is a type ofsocial engineering attackManipulating someone to divulge sensitive or confidential information, usually through digital communication Norton Securitythat aims to get the victim to provide senstive information such as account credentials or personally identifiable information (PII).

These kinds of attacks generally happen through email (phishing), over the phone (vishing), and through text messages (vishing).

A laptop with spam appearing on the screen

A quick look at a phishing email

Click on areas with a pulse to learn more.

A cybercriminal who has stolen documents

Phishing has resulted in a combined total of $44,213,707 in financial losses in 2021.

Additionally, reports to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3)  show that phishing claimed 323,972 victims in 2021 alone.

There are 3 simple steps that you can take to protect yourself from phishing emails.

  1. Avoid clicking links
  2. Whenever possible instead of clicking on a link within an email or text message, manually type the address of the website you know is real. Often times your browser will autofill the correct address for you. This will limit your exposure to potentially spoofed website domains.

  3. Verify the sender
  4. An email can be verified by matching the senders email address with what you know is reputable. For example [email protected] would be an email address an attacker would use. [email protected] is an official google email address because it ends with google.com with no revisions.

    You can learn more from this google support article.

  5. Be skeptcial of impersonal messages
  6. Phishing emails and text messages are sent on a massive scale, reaching the inboxes of thousands of people. This often leads to phishing attempts being very impersonal. When a message calls for you to provide personally identifiable information or does not at least include some your own basic info, then avoid interacting with it.

There was an estimated 66 billion automated spam text messages made in 2022 according to the 2022 Robokiller Report

Learn about smishing - phishing in the form of text messages.