Handling a Phishing Message
A phishing attack is a form of social engineering where the individual is invited (usually via email) to visit a fraudulent website, which is set up for exfiltrating personal information of visitors (Ullah, Edwards, Ramdhany, Chitchyan, Babar, & Rashid, 2018). The emails would guide the user to click on a platform that guides them to a fraudulent site that would provide surfaces for collecting personal information. Banking is one of the industries that are primary targets for phishing attacks. The adversary leads the user to a webpage that resembles the actual appearance of the given bank.
I experienced a deceptive phishing attack that presented me with a surface to provide the login details of my PayPal account. An attack email informed me of a problem with the PayPal system, and they wanted to rectify it for my account. They required me to open my account through a link on the email that would automatically open my account. The email sender had the appearance of the PayPal support contact. I did not hesitate to give the amount of money I kept in the account that they threatened it would get lost if the problem persisted. I clicked the link and asked my friend if he had received a notification about a problem with his account. He yelled at me, claiming that that’s how a phishing attack occurs. I stayed for more than a year without experiencing problems with my transactions despite that I didn’t respond to the rectification alert.
Common sense and consultation are essential prevention tools for handling phishing attacks and responding to instances that request personal information. Cyber-attacks are expected to increase in number and sophistication in the future (Shabut, Lwin, & Hossain, 2016). It is advisable to avoid clicking the link on the email. It is safer to access the real site in the browser and access the site using the usual way to confirm the authenticity of the alert. It is also essential to identify the distinctive features on a surface that differentiate the fraudulent site and the real site.
References
Ullah, F., Edwards, M., Ramdhany, R., Chitchyan, R., Babar, M. A., & Rashid, A. (2018). Data
exfiltration: A review of external attack vectors and countermeasures. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 101, 18-54.
Shabut, A. M., Lwin, K. T., & Hossain, M. A. (2016, December). Cyber attacks, countermeasures,
and protection schemes—A state of the art survey. In 2016 10th International Conference on Software, Knowledge, Information Management & Applications (SKIMA) (pp. 37-44). IEEE.