Phishing: Is it Still Effective?

A common question cyber-folks get asked, is whether phishing is still effective. The resounding answer is yes.

Phishing has been a dominant form of attack for a long time, as it exploits a critical weakness: the human. As much as security infrastructure can be put in place, setup, configured, and monitored, it still takes just one click for a company to be breached. Many institutions have implemented a defense-in-depth strategy to protect their users from phishing attacks or prevent the attack from impacting the environment, but hackers never take a break.

Especially now, with the rise of AI products like ChatGPT and Bard, hackers have found a way to increase their click rate (probably even faster than marketing professionals have). Many sources, like Forbes or CNBC have already reported the known use of AI tools to craft phishing emails. Despite the tools trying to stop such functionality for malicious purposes, hackers are routinely exploiting the algorithms to get what they want. They often use framing or prompt injection to trick the LLM into bypassing its controls and writing the malicious email. (Some hackers are even doing this to craft new malware).

So, yes, phishing is not only still effective, but going to become more so. Gone are the days of misspellings and non-sensical topics, the modern phishing campaign will be targeted, enticing, and efficient. They won’t need to blast thousands of emails hoping for one click, when ten well crafted emails will do the same and probably not be caught by the spam filters.

This is going to highlight the need for enhanced user training, better security engineering, and most importantly: vulnerability and risk management. By doing the latter, even if a hacker successfully compromises a system, they won’t be able to do much and lateral movement will be impossible, limiting the damage. Tools like Glassportal can help you visualize your vulnerabilities and risk, especially within the context of users and systems, to better protect yourself from the new attacks the future holds.

Contact us for a demo: demo@glassportal.io