How to Identify a Phish and How to Protect Against Phishing

Holiday season means phishing season, and that’s not the good kind of fishing that you do while you’re relaxing out on the lake—it’s the cybersecurity nightmare kind of phishing and it poses big risks for businesses of all sizes. My guest on the Converge TechTalk show today is Mison Riggins from Inspired eLearning and we’re talking about cybersecurity and the challenges and risks it presents to businesses today. Most importantly, we’re talking about how to identify a phish and how to protect against phishing.

So, who is Mison? A tech writer by day and a “slayer of cyber ignorance by night,” she’s a tech expert with a passion for learning, writing, and for educating people on all things related to technology and cybersecurity and part of the team at Inspired eLearning. It’s no wonder we get along.

Who is a Target for Phishing and Cyber Criminals?

The reality of business today is that risk is everywhere. While that’s really nothing new, what is a new reality in the last decade or so is that there’s a booming industry led by cyber criminals continually looking to prey on ignorance and weaknesses exhibited by both individuals and companies. Phishing is one of the most popular ways cyber criminals target businesses and find a way in, which is just the tip of the iceberg of the damage they can do.

How to Identify a Phish

Phishing is one of the most common tactics cyber criminals use in order to worm their way past our defenses, both personal and corporate, and learning about phishing could possibly save not only your personal information and accounts from being breached, it can protect your company and your company’s customers as well. In this conversation Mison and I cover:

What is phishing?
How many different kinds of phishing are there?
How does phishing put your company (or the company you work for) at risk?
What are the most common ways people are phished?
What happens when you’re phished and why is it a big deal?

How to Protect Against Phishing —What To Do When It Happens To You

It’s fairly safe to say we are all, individuals and businesses, susceptible to phishing attacks. In fact, it’s a given that we have all been targeted at some point, and we may or may not have fallen prey to those phishing attacks. Knowing that phishing is going to happen is critical, learning what phishing looks like and how it’s designed to trick you into trusting a message or a link, and learning how to protect against phishing is the way that we can keep ourselves and our companies safe. That’s why having a culture fueled by continuous learning and ongoing security training is critical today.

So how do you protect against phishing and what do you do when it happens to you? Mison and I talked about how to wise up to attackers’ ploys aimed at getting our private information and/or breaching our corporate security systems.

You can access the video of our Converge TechTalk interview here:

And grab the audio version here: 

Mison is presenting along with a collection of other cybersecurity experts at the Data Connectors’ Cybersecurity Strategies Conference in Dallas on Wednesday, December 5th. As part of her presentation, Mison will demonstrate to the audience how to create a phish and illustrate why that might be one of the most valuable training exercises your team experiences all year.

If you’ve not yet registered, this is an intimate event designed to provide attendees with the information they need to help develop their cybersecurity strategies and learn what they need to know to protect against security breaches. If also helps attendees learn how to train their teams in an ongoing fashion to ensure companies that their first line of defense—their employees—have the information and knowledge they need to keep themselves and their companies safe.