We have all probably experienced phishing in one way or another, but many people still don’t understand the term and the implications surrounding it. Phishing, in its simplest form, is a cybercrime and a fraudulent attempt to gain sensitive information of the target.
This information includes, but is not limited to:
- Credit card details
- Usernames
- Passwords
- Identification details
These fraudsters achieve this by pretending to be a trusted and well-known entity, like a bank or a popular website. They do this to legitimize themselves, then they will contact the target via various forms of electronic communication, usually saying things like “If you don’t respond to this email in 2 days, your bank account will be locked”. Now you may feel a lot more familiar with the act of phishing.
This has become a bigger problem with the progression of mobile phones. The reason for this is because end users have less screen “real estate” which makes it much harder to recognize the difference between phishing and regular web pages. The user interface doesn’t provide the ability to identify phishing attacks through hovering over hyperlinks, which is one way to find attacks as it shows the destination.
Mobile devices are very limited because they are connected to outside traditional firewalls and usually lack endpoint security solutions. They are also vulnerable due to the high amount of messaging applications that aren’t used on desktops, making them the ideal target for these phishing attacks.
With how much we believe that we have systems in place to prevent these attacks, people have still been falling for them with the number increasing by 85% every year since 2011. This means that enterprises need to create a new system for combatting these issues as email phishing security is no longer enough.
We need to start looking at mobile protection security efficiently and stop turning a blind eye. There also needs to be more companies delving into this security, like the multitude of different options we have for anti-virus software on desktops. It would be wise if these companies could create an endpoint protection platform for all different mobile devices before the statistics for attacks increase further.