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How a Popular Company Could’ve Prevented a Phishing Attack
Industry News

How a Popular Company Could’ve Prevented a Phishing Attack

The first known mention of the word “phishing” happened in the America Online (AOL) user group named appropriately “AOHell.” Phishing has raised hell ever since. As technology has evolved so has the sophistication of targeted phishing attacks. In this report, we walk through a real-world case study of how a socially engineered phishing attack worked on a popular company, and show you some steps on how it could have been prevented.

This report guides you through some big questions and answers about phishing, including:

  • What is social engineering?

  • What is spear-phishing?

  • What happened when a popular company was breached?

  • How was the breach successful?

  • How can social engineering, targeted phishing and lateral movement lead to a security breach?

  • Authentication best practices to prevent sophisticated phishing attacks

Phishing is low effort yet very effective at allowing hackers to steal credentials. Phishing and socially engineered attacks can be prevented with multi-factor authentication (MFA or 2FA) in most instances. MFA, (which is a security measure recommended by the Department of Homeland Security), requires multiple factors such as your device, biometrics, location and more to prove you are who you say you are before granting access. It is the first layer of a zero trust cyber security framework.

We live in a distracted multitasking world that makes it easy to accidentally click without checking out a message thoroughly. Security Boulevard reports 2020 saw an 85% overall increase in all categories of cybercrime for the year, including a more than 600% increase in phishing attacks.

Learn how trusted devices, zero trust, adaptive user policies and more can thwart phishing.

Download Anatomy of A Modern Phishing Attack today and learn how to implement preemptive prescriptive cyber protection for your cloud and on-prem applications and network, and say farewell to phishing threats.


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