The Characteristics Of Phishing Attacks

The most efficient way to protect yourself against phishing attacks is to increase the knowledge on the subject. Since phishing attacks are less technical and focus heavily on social engineering, they are quite challenging to deal with. However, with enough understanding of the attacks, you can prepare your best defense against the attacks. To that end, knowing the characteristics of phishing attacks helps you to be better prepared to defend against them or at the very least, to avoid falling for phishing scams.

An exaggerated sense of urgency

The inflated sense of urgency is a characteristic that’s specific to phishing emails and calls. The messages are designed to come across as a severe crisis, which cannot be ignored or put off. However, the messages tend to go overboard to get the victim to lower their guard for easier deception and manipulation. For instance, the hacker could send a message explaining that your account was hacked. In normal circumstances, the bank would ask you to confirm whether the unauthorized access to your account was your doing. However, phishing emails or calls encourage you to take immediate action to solve the issue.

Vague information

Despite containing messages that focus on emergencies or similar situations, phishing messages tend to lack all the critical information. For instance, a phishing email would explain a hacking issue in your bank account but fail to elaborate on the time of the attack and the IP address from which the hack originated. Such details are what differentiate a phishing attack from a genuine attack. Additionally, phishing websites contain less information than they should contain. For instance, the contact information and site map that would be on the footer might be missing.

Spelling and grammar errors

This is a characteristic of most general phishing attacks and all phishing site attacks. Usually, a hacker spends more time learning about the target and crafting a suitable email message and website when it comes to spear and whale phishing. However, since general attacks are mass-produced, hackers tend to be less careful, and they end up having several typos and grammar mistakes. For the phishing websites, the errors are contained for the URL. Although a hacker might try to create a domain name similar to the one used by an official site, the URL cannot be copied. Therefore, any typo in a URL could indicate the presence of a phishing site.

Requires you to take a specific action

It is not a phishing attack unless the message asks for sensitive information from the victim or asks the victim to download an attached document. The message first increases the victim’s sense of urgency and then asks for confidential information to resolve the crisis. The desire for immediate action that is expressed in phishing attacks is one of its typical characteristics. However, unlike other characteristics, this one might not be as obvious as the rest.

Poor operation on phishing sites

Often, phishing sites are developed through the use of phishing kits. Although there are phishing kits that allow for the development of quality sites, most lead to the development of sites with poor operation. For instance, the site might be slow, the UI might be unresponsive, the sites are often riddled with popups, and there are missing details on the site. Should you find yourself on a website that shows signs of poor or failed operation despite it functioning effectively on prior occasions, then you should be wary of being redirected to a phishing site.

The Takeaway

Understanding the characteristics of phishing attacks is only one aspect of the knowledge that you need to protect yourself against phishing attacks. You should also look into the nature of social engineering attacks and how to protect against them. However, keep in mind that the information is always changing and should be updated regularly. For instance, typos and grammar errors used to be a common characteristic of all phishing attacks in yesteryears. However, now spear-phishing and whale phishing attacks are more sophisticated and have fewer mistakes.

"This articles first appeared at techwarn.com "