Nearly a third of breaches in the past year involved phishing, according
to the 2019 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report.

Phishing uses malicious emails to trick the recipient into believing
the message or sender is real and to click a link or download an
attachment. This activates allowing the “Phisher” to plant key logger
(a man-in-the-middle that captures your network credentials), a
ransomware bot and all kinds of nasty stuff.

They are used to accessing important data resulting in identity theft
and financial loss. The Coronavirus pandemic gives bad actors an outsize
opportunity; so scammers are launching literally millions like this every
day and sadly they’re often successful. They continually update their tactics,
but there are some keys to help us recognize and avoid Phishing.

Phishing emails and text messages look like they’re from a reliable
source, a person or a company you know or trust. Maybe a friend,
business contact, bank, a credit card company, a social networking site,
an online payment website or app, or an online store. And Phishing is deadly,
for example recent data breach at Magellan Health, one phishing email lead
to company data breach.

Ways To Prevent A Phishing Scam

According to Industry expert, Andrew Cheung, phishing emails can be hard
to spot but here are some tips to protect yourself:

- If you receive an email from a known contact but it seems suspicious,
contact them through another channel instead of replying to that email.

- Don’t post personal data, like your birthday, your itinerary, your
address or phone number on social media.

- Use IronCAP’s digital signature proofing along with end-to-end
encryption, the perfect cocktail of data protection and security.