Phishing has flourished in recent years for businesses of all sizes. The consequences can lead to a tarnished reputation and loss of business. Foreign secretary William Hague recently announced a global centre for cyber security will soon be opened at the University of Oxford, which will create a collaborative bank of knowledge giving countries a greater understanding of past attacks and the present threat landscape.
The availability of personal information via social media has made the hacker’s job a lot easier, this stresses the importance that businesses must educate their users to be vigilant at all times, especially in their personal online activities.
Commenting on the attacks to the Guardian’s twitter accounts and offering advice to other organisations to avoid such attacks, Wieland Alge, IT security pioneer, inventor of one of the most robust corporate firewalls and VP and General Manager EMEA, Barracuda Networks writes:
The form of the attacks on the Guardian is very common and extremely similar to those we saw on the BBC last month. Criminal organisations dealing in internet attacks now focus their activity where users are most active: social networks. Drive-by-downloads are an effective tool, as they do their damage with just a single click in a tweet or Facebook post.
The most likely source of the attacks on the Guardian and the BBC is via social engineering – someone managing to obtain the password by fooling the user who keeps the password.
You should always use hard-to-guess, hard-to-crack, unique passwords for your online accounts that you are not using anywhere else on the web. Some Security vendors offer free-to-use systems for users to avoid such attacks such as our Profile Protector, which scans for dubious objects and malicious links, protecting the user from attacks.
Common sense will remain the first line of defence, but anyone surfing without the proper and up-to-date technical security measures risks falling victim to an attack through only a moment’s lapse.