To understand what phishing attacks, do, let’s understand the meaning of phishing first. It means to trick someone and steal valuable information and then use it for your evil intentions like monetary fraud, data leak etc.
Similarly phishing attack is a kind of cybersecurity attack where attackers trick you via various means just as fraud Ent emails, Mails that look convincing and ask you of your sensitive information and then use that to cause you financial, social and monetary harm.
Let’s understand this with a simple scenario, Alice is a database administrator and works for ABC company. Now one day she received an email that seemed quite trustful and opens it and clicks on a malicious link in that.
The moment Alice clicks, It fetches the admin credentials of her account and then her account is exploited to fetch all the data from the database.
Here, Alice fell for a phishing attack that led to a huge data leak and unauthorized access to data.
FAQ
Q1. Do Phishing attacks affect day to day lives?
Yes, Now adays incidents of compromised bank accounts are increasing day by day that lead to heavy monetary loss.
Q2. How can I save myself from phishing attack?
There are various ways of protecting yourself from phishing attack such as:
- Do not reply, open mails from untrusted/unrecognized sources. Such emails are the source of common phishing attacks.
- If you are accessing any external site, make sure that the site is secure, i.e. https should be there in the beginning of the external site you access.
- Do not allow all pop ups to open up.
- If you find anything suspicious, stop right there and do not proceed further.
