Question

You are the IT and Network Security Director at a financial institution in Malaysia. Due to

the rise in cyber crime in recent years, you have been asked to prepare a plan of action

to combat phishing (for online transaction services provided by the financial institution).

In your plan of action, you should

a) Define and explain in details what phishing is.

b) Elaborate how can phishing affect the financial institution.

c) Explain how can the financial institution clients avoid being affected by phishing.

Answer 1

a)Phishing

In simple words, phishing is a cyber crime. It is a form of social engineering techniques, that uses the fake websites or links that seems to be genuine to the customer, to steel information like passwords, important details etc.

The term phishing is similar to fishing, but here instead of setting out hooks to "fish", we use some digital way to capture the secure data from the customer.

The usual procedure is to get access to the victims device , then access the secured details. There are number of ways for this, most of the time, to get an entrance to the victims device, teh hacker will send a link, or a software, When the cusomer, opens it , teh hacker, will get a way to that device.

b) phishing affect the financial institution.

Financial organizations are the most effected hardly by the phishing attacks. Usually the black hat hackers try to steel the datas which are used to access the bank details of the customer and to make transaction in that . Sometimes, after getting the bank details, they will also sell those data to others. And this can baddly affect the security image of that particular organization infront of the society.

c)The phishing attacks can be avoided, if the customer had looked some details like:

• always check if the given link was correct or not.
• Never give personal information
• Never share the one time password(OTP) to anyone.(eevn if the caller said that he is from bank)
• Try to avoid clicking the popup buttons.
• update the browser definion to new
• use an antivirus software.