The phishing background
Phishing is the most dominant form of cyber attack, threatening citizens' assets, business finances and their existence, global economies and national security. With account takeovers, bank fraud, intellectual property loss, reputational damage and disruption of company operations, phishing has deep and wide-ranging impacts.
In the UK, ~45 million people had scam texts or calls between June and August 2021 (BBC News). Fraudsters stole £754 million in the first half of 2021, £4 million a day, and less than half of the money lost was refunded by banks. The banking trade body, UK Finance, considers the level of fraud a national security threat. There are societal implications, with the impact on wellbeing calculated as £9 billion a year, with victims suffering from anxiety and ill health. (BBC News)
Phishing is the predominant form of cybercrime according to the FBI, and the social engineering nature of it means it is the most common entry point into ransomware, the attack which shuts down whole corporate networks and demands extortionate payment. The criminal corporate phishing market is worth $9 billion (RiskIQ, 2020), with IBM finding that a breach caused by phishing costs a business $4.65 million on average.
Current technology solutions like firewalls, antivirus, blocklists and perimeter security are ineffective, and phishing awareness training is not working. Phish emails are hard to spot for the vast majority — Yubico found that 97% were unable to identify one. The head of the UK National Cyber Security Centre at GCHQ says that anyone can be phished, even experienced technology experts, and said he himself was phished.
Epi Phishing Protection
Introduce Epi's safety net in your business to further protect your users from phishing.
With our browsing protection, users are alerted about an untrusted site, before submitting credentials and sensitive information. In addition to warnings, you can choose to block untrusted pages outright.
Epi's phishing defences are available in Web Launch and Live Trust . With Web Launch, only trusted sites can be opened and links can be checked for safety. With Live Trust, realtime alerts indicate the trustworthiness of the current webpage.
As well as protecting your staff on the web, your business can add the links and services you use in your orgnet so that you and your users know they are using only the official company tools and services.
