It’s impossible to avoid the risk of phishing attacks entirely, since employees still need to do their jobs, as Kelly Sheridan at Dark Reading puts it. Sheridan points to a recent report from Cisco which shows that phishing attacks are increasing in number while getting harder to detect.
“It seems never-ending sometimes, the kinds of threats that arrive through email,” Ben Munroe from Cisco Security told Dark Reading. “The fact that it’s still a problem for us … is incredible.”
“Things are not getting better and in fact, things are getting worse.”
Munroe added that employees can’t be expected to identify these threats on their own, because attackers are actively working to outfox them by switching up their tactics.
“It’s not fair for everyone to criticize users for doing what users have to do,” he said. “It isn’t fair to always say users are not sophisticated — attackers are extremely sophisticated.”
Sheridan notes that phishing attacks place the burden of defense on employees, since attackers are bypassing other defenses and targeting the humans directly.
“Employees are forced to read every message, make judgment calls about what they receive, and decide what to open, click, download, and respond to,” she writes. “The right amount of social engineering can manipulate recipients into accidentally letting attackers in.”
Employees need to be constantly aware of new techniques being used by attackers. New-school security awareness training with simulated phishing tests can make your employees far more likely to resist real phishing attacks, because they’ll know what to watch out for and they’ll be expecting to be targeted. And it’s also realistic about the ways in which we use email for our jobs.
Read more on the Dark Reading blog.
