The days of emails from supposed princes in Nigeria looking for an heir, or firms acting on behalf of wealthy deceased relatives, are few and far between these days, although you can still find the odd, wildly extravagant, claim here and there.
Netflix, Amazon, and Facebook are often used for this purpose, as it’s highly likely that the victim will have an account associated with these brands. Today’s phishing usually involves some form of social engineering, where the message will appear to have been sent from a legitimate, often well-known company, informing their customers that they need to take action of some kind. What happens next depends entirely on the malware being executed – some may encrypt files and prevent the user from accessing the machine, while others may attempt to stay hidden in order to act as a backdoor for other malware.Īs computer literacy has improved over the years, and as users have grown accustomed to online threats, phishing techniques have had to become more sophisticated. Instead of being directed to a helpful resource, a malicious file is downloaded and executed on the user’s machine. The typical tactic is to trick a user into clicking on an embedded link or downloading an attachment. MIT technology review insights Download now To make matters worse, these passwords tend to be reused across multiple sites, with one in three people (32%) having the same password to access different accounts. Passwords that are weak or easy to guess are more common than you might expect: recent findings from the NCSC found that around one in six people uses the names of their pets as their passwords, making them highly predictable. In the words of US politician Katie Porter, most parents utilise a stronger password to stop their children from “watching too much YouTube on their iPad”. Despite this, even if the password hadn’t been leaked, it wouldn’t have been hard for attackers to guess it. It was revealed that ‘solarwinds123’, a password created and leaked by an intern, had been publicly accessible through a private GitHub repository since June 2018, enabling hackers to plan and carry out the massive supply chain attack. It’s worth taking into account the role of a leaked password in one of the biggest cyber security stories of the last two years, the SolarWinds hack. The best passwords are the ones you can't remember.
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