Question

Deceitful emails are illusory measures that are taken up by attackers for personal gain in order to lure in innocent people. They are used to scam and defraud people. The emails usually involve offers that are too good to be true, and they are targeted towards naïve individuals. If you as a Cybersecurity expert are facing a phishing email scenario in your organisation Trident, how will you educate employees within your organisation. Illustrate and justify the use of machine learning to catch email fraud and spam to top management besides ensuring digital literacy in your organisation. Cite your sources.

Answer 1

• Phishing is a type of fraud in which a hacker attempts to gather personal information or credentials by impersonating a legitimate brand and sending users to a malicious website.

• Phishing is an email scam that impersonates a business to trick recipients into divulging account credentials or clicking on a malware-laden link. In most attacks, phishing involves luring a victim with a link to a fraudulent website or including an email attachment laced with malware.

• Awareness is always the first key. Informative emails—from official, legit company channels—as well as word of mouth, workshops, and other educational mediums are important to inform employee that threats exist. Many employee will likely think themselves unimportant enough to target. Part of the education process should be to teach that intruders can access networks through all kinds of methods, and who they target often doesn’t matter so long as they can get your employees’ personal information—or just get them to click a malicious link.

• Most employees have no idea about phishing until they fall into such a trap. Basic outlining of what phishing is and how hackers execute these phishing attacks is a fundamental knowledge everyone should possess.

• Arrange Employee training:

  As attacks become more sophisticated, employee must be continually trained in the latest phishing attacks and techniques. In addition to recurring awareness training, contextual training delivered at the moment a employee clicks on a malicious email provides instant feedback on the behavior.

  Training content that is personalized for the user based on the brand used in the phishing attempt gives the training context, unlike annual trainings that are typically conducted in a group setting and based on generic emails. Ultimately, the training experience will be more significant, and the phishing attempt more memorable than the simulations used in training sessions.

  Equally important to phishing prevention is encouraging users to report suspicious emails. This gives IT the opportunity to warn the company about incoming attacks and gives the security operations team the opportunity to use the phishing email to strengthen the email filter.

Some of employees may be beginners with technology, or perhaps they’re just trusting people. Actually seeing and being able to implement what they learned in regards to spotting phishing emails will go a long way to supporting employees’ ability to spot them in the future.

• Arrange Cybersecurity awareness training

Cybersecurity awareness training focuses on the human element of cyberattacks—the mistakes that open the doors to a business’s systems and data. In training, we’re taught to choose difficult passwords, change them frequently without ever sharing them, never click on a phishing link, and follow a variety of other best practices. In a perfect world, we would follow these rules.

• phishing awareness training,

Employees should be educated about how phishing technology works to protect them and how it can be improved with their help. For example, reporting a phishing email to IT sets in motion a string of events that your users likely don’t understand.

Training Employees to understand the technology designed to protect them teaches employees the limits of cybersecurity when people are the target and their role in strengthening it. Knowing they are actively involved in the evolution of the technology and experiencing the benefits of the improvements is what encourages emplloyee to report. In the same way cybersecurity experts form communities—often composed of competing vendors— creating a community of reporters who are actively involved in protecting your business and, ultimately, their own livelihoods.

Show an example of a phishing email used against the company in the past; your IT department likely has records. General examples are good, but specific ones related to company are even better.

• Employees should be aware of the anti-phishing tools provided by the company. The administration must explain how they can leverage these tools for their security. They must be encouraged to utilize any available antivirus, plugins, or add-ons installed in their system by the employer.
• Employees should be aware of a defined escalation plan if they ever find any clue of phishing attacks or face one themselves. Employees should be able to quickly take the right action or escalate the situation to the concerned team to minimize possible damage.

• sending security awareness e-mail to employees is an essential practice for organization. Additionally, businesses must revise their phishing awareness practices every once in a while. Thus, employees will be aware of the latest phishing threats and advanced anti-phishing techniques. The employer should invest in such training campaigns or even consult a cyber-security expert who can guide their employees in the right direction.

The use of machine learning to catch email fraud and spam to top management besides ensuring digital literacy in your organisation.

Keep software updated

This is a critical requirement for any computer system and application. Always keep OS system, services and applications updated to have the latest bugs and vulnerabilities patched.

Enable system firewall

Most operating systems include a full pre-configured firewall to protect against malicious packets from both the inside and the outside. A system firewall will act as the first digital barrier whenever someone tries to send a bad packet to any of open ports.

Use different/strong passwords

Never use the same password on more than one website, and always make sure it combines letters, special characters and numbers.

The best way to sort this out is to use a password manager like 1Password, LastPass or Keepass, which will help you generate strong passwords for each website, and at the same time store them in an encrypted database.

Use antivirus and anti-malware software

Keeping antivirus and anti-malware software up to date and running scans over local storage data is always recommended. While free antivirus/antimalware solutions can be helpful they are often merely trial software, and don’t offer full protection against most common virus/malware and other network threats.

Activate your email’s anti-spam blocking feature

A lot of computer hacking takes place whenever you open an unsolicited email containing suspicious links or attachments. First things first: enable the anti-spam feature of your email client; and second: never open links or attachments from unsolicited recipients. This will keep safe from phishing attacks and unwanted infections.

Encrypt email

By using a PGP key you can ensure email will only be read by its intended recipient. PGP helps you sign, encrypt and decrypt texts, emails, files and much more, so you can increase the security of your email communications.