What is Phishing?
Phishing is an attack that uses deception or psychological manipulation to trick the target into performing some action. For example, the most common type of phishing attack involves an email that pretends to be from a legitimate, trusted sender and is designed to get the user to click on a link or open an attachment. If they do so, they may be taken to a webpage that harvests their login credentials or download malware to their computer.
Phishing attacks are commonly used to steal sensitive data or provide an attacker with a foothold on a target system that they can use to perform future attacks. Some of the common types of phishing attacks include:
- Spear Phishing: Some phishing attacks are general ones, trying to target as many people as possible. Spear phishing attacks are more focused, using a pretext that is more likely to be believable to an individual or a small group.
- Whaling: Whaling is a special type of phishing attack targeting high-level executives or employees with access to sensitive data or functionality in an organization. These people are targeted because they offer a higher potential payoff to the attacker.
- Vishing: Vishing attacks are phishing attacks performed over the phone rather than email or a messaging platform. They are designed to steal sensitive information or trick users into installing malware on their system as part of a tech support scam.
- Smishing: Smishing attacks use text messages to perform phishing attacks. These attacks take advantage of users’ relatively poor security when reading, answering, and clicking on links in text messages.
What is Spoofing?
Spoofing attacks are all about deception. The goal of a spoofing attack is to make some piece of data look different than it really is. Spoofing is generally used to make an attack look more plausible or believable.
An attacker can spoof various types of information to achieve various goals, including:
- Email Spoofing: Email spoofing attacks change the apparent source address of an email. This makes the email appear to come from a known address, which increases the probability that the recipient will trust it.
- DNS Spoofing: DNS spoofing attacks meddle with the data used to convert domain names to IP addresses. This can reroute traffic from a legitimate website to a malicious one controlled by the attacker.
- IP Spoofing: IP spoofing modifies the source IP address of web traffic. This can be used to bypass defenses or conceal the attacker’s identity.
- GPS Spoofing: Geolocation data collected via GPS can be used for various purposes, including for verifying a user’s identity. GPS spoofing can be used to defeat this authentication factor or to make it more difficult to identify the person behind an attack.
- Caller ID Spoofing: In a vishing attack, the attacker calls the target over the phone. Caller ID spoofing can be used to make this attack more plausible by making the caller ID information match the pretext used by the attacker.
The Difference Between Spoofing and Phishing Attacks
An attacker may use both spoofing and phishing as part of the same attack. However, these two concepts are distinct.
Phishing is a type of attack. It uses deception, manipulation, etc. to induce the recipient to perform some action that the attacker wants, such as clicking on a link or opening a malicious attachment. Spoofing is a means for making certain types of attacks — such as phishing — more believable or effective. For example, an attacker performing a phishing attack may use email spoofing to make the malicious email appear to originate from a trusted source, increasing the probability that the recipient will trust the email and do what the attacker wants.
Harmony Email Security Anti-Phishing Solution
Phishing attacks are some of the most common cyberattacks that many organizations face. A successful attack can plant malware on an organization’s systems or steal user credentials or other sensitive data that can be used in later attacks.
Email security solutions can prevent phishing attacks, scanning emails’ contents and attachments for malicious functionality or links to phishing sites. To learn more about available email security solutions check out the Forrester Wave for Enterprise Email Security 2023.
Check Point Harmony Email and Office provides robust protection against phishing attacks across email and other common media. To learn more about how Check Point’s anti-phishing solutions can help your organization can manage the phishing threat, sign up for a free demo today.
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