Increased vigilance required to defend against phishing and scam messages
Information security now!
Phishing and scam messages are constantly evolving, with criminals utilising various technologies, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, as well as psychological methods to win their victims’ trust. And no wonder, as phishing campaigns are lucrative for criminals. According to the NCSC-FI’s estimate, approximately one hundred Finnish organisations have had their email accounts compromised in the last few months as a result.
One of the most significant developments contributing to the believability of online scams has been the utilisation of social manipulation. What this means is that scammers strive to collect as much information as possible about their potential victims from open information sources, such as social media profiles and organisations’ websites. Based on the collected information, the criminals then proceed to tailor their scam to the target. For example, invoice fraud attempts are typically targeted at persons who handle invoices and monetary transactions in organisations.
The original article was published on 21 June 2023 in Finnish.