General phishing attacks target a wide variety of people, typically flooding thousands of inboxes.
EE has had to work on an emergency upgrade to protect its broadband customers after UK researcher, Scott Helme, discovered a security flaw. Security professionals have pointed out that all affected customers are still at risk of falling pray to phishing attacks designed to trick a user into handing over their WiFi password.
Commenting on the attacks on EE broadband customers, Wieland Alge, IT security pioneer, inventor of one of the most robust corporate firewalls and VP and general manager EMEA, Barracuda Networks said:
“Phishing has flourished in recent years. Cyber criminals are using this increasingly sophisticated method to target businesses, resulting in tarnished reputation and loss of sales. For small businesses the number one priority when suffering from a phishing attack should be to protect their customers and to never lose their identity.
“With phishing attacks, the attacker usually researches personal information about the targeted individuals in order to make their messages sound more convincing. The availability of personal information via social media has made this process a lot easier for cyber criminals.
“Businesses of all sizes need to recognise the importance of educating their users to be vigilant at all times, especially in their personal online activities.
“There are two well established countermeasures to mitigate the risks for organisations. One is protecting the employees by proper email and web security systems. The second one is protecting your databases using properly configured web application firewalls (WAFs).
“Unfortunately there are still too many websites out there that provide email databases far too easily to the evil guys.”