PhishMe Tells 60% UK Office Workers Getting Phishing E-mail Daily

According to a poll conducted by Onepoll, a market research firm on 1,000 office workers all over the UK for PhishMe, an organization providing anti-phishing training firm, 60% of the office workers in the UK receives phishing e-mails everyday, as published by softpedia.com on January 15, 2013.

Especially, through spam e-mails, senders try to instigate the recipient in risky activities by disgusting malicious attachment or links in apparently genuine content. In case of the user not responding, then it could permit the hacker to control the corporate network to obtain susceptible information, such as R&D information, usernames, and passwords, etc.

While speaking about this intriguing discovery, Scott Greaux, Vice President of Product Management and Services at Phish Me, claimed that almost 60% of employees receive phishing e-mails daily, so obviously technical controls are not successful to restrict these messages as they go through the system. They reach to the users' inboxes and for many companies it is purely down to luck if the employees respond as per the news published by cbronline.com on January 14, 2013.

Further, according to Greaux, many users might click on the link or open an attachment and then continue their work without being aware of the inference of their actions.

Also, according to the research, a minor percentage of the targets of these phishing attacks (6%) received more than 10 malicious e-mails on a daily basis.

In the words of Greaux, user education is necessary for adding "human sensors" to an organization security infrastructure to advance the security, as per a statement published by computerweekly.com on January 15, 2013.

As per Greaux, proper training will assure employees stop and think before trusting the email they got every day.

For instance, they would be aware and hold a view at the essential URL, not just the exhibited text, to view where the link is in reality going.

They would look at the e-mail headers and try to comprehend if the e-mail address has been spoofed. And they have to use common sense-if anything does not seems true or is too good to be correct, then they won't involuntarily trust it," said by Greaux.

Related article: Poison Ivy Compromises Computer and Accesses Stored Information

» SPAMfighter News - 1/19/2013