Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 21 | Page 94

FINAL WORD Cofense phishing defence leverages human intelligence Phishing remains one of the biggest threats to businesses and organisations, with innovative solutions required to help keep attacks at bay. Alexandre Depret-Bixio, Vice President of Sales – META, Cofense, explains how the company is leveraging human intelligence as part of its phishing defence – and why this works so well. Why is phishing such a threat to business, especially in triggering data breaches? According to Verizon’s most recent Data Breach Investigations Report, email is used in 96% of socially engin eered attacks. Phishing is still the number one cyberattack vector. The statistics supporting this claim vary but all lead to the same conclusion – phishing is the biggest spearpoint used in data breaches. What’s more, Verizon notes that phishing and pretexting represent 93% of all socially engineered data breaches. (Pretexting involves a false narrative designed to trick the user.) And Cloudmark reports that successful phishing attacks on average 94 INTELLIGENTCIO cost mid-sized companies US$1.6 million. Phishing emails deliver malware of every type, including ransomware. Phishing is also a handy way to carry out social engineering. For example: an email spoofing the head of HR asking employees to click a link and log onto a page to agree to a corporate policy. Or an urgent message – again, spoofing someone in the organisation, perhaps even www.intelligentcio.com