Phishing attacks are no longer confined to the email inbox

We subscribe to The Hacker News (THN) Newsletter and recommend you do the same to keep abreast of news about cyber threats to your organisation.

From time to time the THN Newsletter includes useful articles to raise awareness of trends to look out for when interacting with the web.

This week they published an article entitled "5 Reasons Why Attackers Are Phishing Over LinkedIn".

Its focus: 1 in 3 phishing attacks now occur through non-email channels like social media, search engines, and messaging apps.

Read more: 5 Reasons Why Attackers Are Phishing Over LinkedIn.

Beware social media phishers

The article states that LinkedIn in particular has become a hotbed for phishing attacks.

And points out that whilst LinkedIn is a personal app, it is routinely used by professionals to network and build contacts.

And is quite often accessed from corporate devices.

Other media targeted by phishers apparently include: Microsoft Entra and Google Workspace.

Why is social media phishing attractive to hackers?

The article highlights the following five reasons, and considers each in turn.

1. It bypasses traditional email security tools.
2. It is cheap, easy, and scalable.
3. It is easy to access high-value targets.
4. Targeted users are more likely to fall for it (dropping their guard whilst establishing new networking contacts?).
5. The potential rewards are immense.

Why should every employee care?

The article points out that any one single account compromise can quickly snowball into a multi-million pound business-wide breach.

Such breaches can lead to business failure and of course resulting job losses.

Just consider the horror story previously reported by THN and covered in an earlier blog post.

Read more: How one bad password ended a 158 year old business.