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What is Vishing Attack?
“Hello, I am calling from your bank. I would like to confirm a few details of your account…” Seems familiar, right? Did you fall for it? Technology has advanced to a greater extent in making our lives much easier. But nothing can beat cyber crooks when it comes to keeping up with technological innovations. They make sure to maintain their level and adjust their scams accordingly. Keeping up with the race are Vishing-attacks, one of the major criminal tech-scams.
Vishing term comes from the combination of two words, ‘voice’ and ‘phishing’. Vishing attacks are existing since the service of internet phone service providers started. It is a fraud practice of deceiving individuals into revealing personal and confidential information. However, in the process of vishing, attackers use internet telephone services instead of regular means such as websites, emails, or phone calls.
A vishing attack is carried out by manipulating people emotionally or scaring them by showing urgency in giving up their personal information. The numbers are created in a manner to trick the victims by making them believe that they are actual numbers.
Such phishing attacks are deployed by spoofing legitimate phone numbers to deceive people into believing the call is legitimate. In fact, even if you don’t answer the call, vishers make sure to leave a provoking message that you are tempted to call them back.
Vishing attacks, especially pretending to be claiming from your bank accounts is very common nowadays. In these types of cases, Vishers pretend to impersonate a legitimate bank in order to get the bank account details of the customers over the call. Although there are various other existing vishing techniques to trick people for personal information.
Prevailing Vishing Techniques
Vishing techniques can be carried out in various types, such as:
- VoIP: VoIP (stands for, Voice over Internet Protocol), this technique of vishing helps attackers in making calls and exploiting databases that are connected to VoIP systems. This technique helps attackers in making several calls anytime, anywhere through an internet-based phone system.
- Wardialing: In this vishing technique, a list of automatically scanned telephone numbers is used for dialing every individual’s number in the local area code. This vishing attack is deployed to look out for the unprotected modems. Listeners are tricked into entering their bank account details or debit/credit card details.
- Social Engineering: The technique is used for bypassing complicated security hardware and software. Vishers use this technique to sound relatively professional and convincing over the call intending to gain sensitive information from their targets.
- Dumpster Diving: This hack involves digging through the bank’s dumped files to obtain customer information, vendor lists, confidential business details, etc. The main objective of dumpster diving is to dig out a list of clients’ phone numbers.
Aforesaid vishing techniques are the most common practices of fraud phone calls. Industries and organizations must follow some preventive measures to avoid this kind of cyber attack. Proceeding further for guidelines on how you can prevent becoming a target of a vishing attack.
How to Prevent Vishing Attacks?
- If anyone asks you to provide your confidential information, don’t entertain them, even if they claim to be calling from your bank. Banks never ask for your personal, sensitive, or confidential information over the call.
- If someone asks for the one time password (OTP) over the phone, do not respond to their requests. OTPs are meant for users, and, any legitimate authority never asks for OTP from their users over the call.
- This looks like a dicey fact. Try to state something to relevant this statement. As in how users can know that this is spam or is not spam email.
- The best way to prevent a vishing attack is by training your employees using employee awareness and simulation like Threatcop. Kratikal, one of India’s leading cybersecurity companies, provides this best product.
Threatcop is a cyber-security awareness tool that offers simulation attacks on a selected group of individuals. The tool provides simulations against employee-focused attack vectors like Phishing, Vishing, SMiShing, Ransomware, Cyber scams, and the Risk of Removable Media. For Vishing, threatcop runs a to check their vulnerability level over a voice call.
It is a real-time simulation attack tool that tracks individual employees’ real-time threat posture. With Threatcop, you get a customized dashboard that shows the complete report of an individual’s vulnerability assessment score.
The tool comes with these amazing features:
- Tool Operation Training: A Threatcop is a security attack simulator and awareness
tool that simulates a Phishing attack.
- Create/customize/import Email templates: Customize or import email templates just the way you like.
- Dummy Replication of Latest Attacks: Become proactive and alert with the latest dummy replication of cyber attacks.
- Scheduled Campaigns: Schedule simulation attacks campaigns according to your suitable date and time.
- Email Reply Tracking: One can have full tracking of the email delivery and the rate of email deliverability.
- Hack Records of Employees: Get the full jack history of your employees for the in-depth analysis of employee vulnerability scores.
- Automated Security Awareness Program: The Simulation attack is generally followed by employee awareness training via LMS.
Co-Founder & COO at Threatcop
Department: Operations and Marketing
Dip Jung Thapa, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Threatcop, a leading cybersecurity company dedicated to enhancing people security management for businesses. With a profound understanding of cybersecurity issues, Dip plays a pivotal role in driving Threatcop’s mission to safeguard people’s digital lives.
