Phishing is a mode of cyber attack where a hacker uses phone calls, texts, fraudulent websites, and emails to lure and target users, and trick them into sharing sensitive information. They may also try to make victims download malware or expose themselves to other cybercrimes unknowingly.
Phishing is a form of social engineering and can involve elements like fake stores, pressure tactics, deception, and human error, to manipulate victims and make them unintentionally harm organizations. In this guide, we will cover why preventing phishing attacks is crucial for organization. You’ll get a solid understanding of how to prevent phishing attacks in organizations and more below.
Why Preventing Phishing Attacks Is Critical?
Preventing phishing attacks is crucial because these attacks serve as an entry point to other major cybercrimes. Think of it as attackers setting up their foothold and getting insurance by going undetected. They use human psychology as levers to steal sensitive data, install malware, and do more harm than good to everyone in the organization.
The implications of phishing extend beyond just financial losses. You lose identities, create and spread emotional trauma, and take years to recover from damages caused by reputational losses. A single data breach can impact an organization by massively affecting business continuity. When companies lose money, they lose value. And when you fail to secure your customer data, you face hefty fines under regulations like the GDPR in the UK, lawsuits, and other strict penalties.
How Phishing Attacks Work?
Phishing attacks work by going through multiple steps or phases. There's no one clear answer to this. But the basic principle is this: they take advantage of human emotions and exploit user psychologically. The attacker will follow these steps:
Study Victims (Reconnaissance)
The hacker will gain intel about their targets and their behaviors across social media, forums, and websites. All the information they learn about them will help them to craft believable messages and target them much more effectively.
Create a Bait and Lure
This is what we call the lure creation phase. The email will appear to come from a legit and trusted source. Psychological triggers like fear, urgency, and enticing offers to pressure victims will follow and be included in them. When the victim reads the email, they might act quickly and respond without thinking since the offer or info is that good.
Hook and Exploit
Once the victim is prompted into taking action - like clicking on a malicious link or opening an attachment, they are in the trap. They may enter info and submit via fraudulent forms and hand over more control to the attacker.
Command Control
By this time, the attacker has everything they want and need to take control over systems. They can use the stolen information to hijack systems, transfer funds, commit identity theft, and blackmail others in the organization. They can even launch larger-scale attacks and gain stronger footholds within the organization.
Warning Signs of a Phishing Attempt
Here are the top warning signs of a phishing attempt:
Familiar Greetings and Messages
You'll get a familiar sense of urgency. For example, messages like, "Your account is being locked down soon, please verify," "Regarding your recent purchase...", and stuff like that. The message will sound convincing and show some of your personal data with designated timelines to reel you in. The domain of your email will look very similar to the original.
For example, you can't make out the difference between gmail.com and gmail.co at first glance. When you receive multiple emails, you miss these subtle signs or nuances.
Similar Company Names and Entities
Hackers can use the names of company officials, CEOs, stakeholders, and other entities in their emails, including photos, signatures, and writing styles. Remember, we are in the age of AI, so it's not uncommon to use AI tools to create personalized and very convincing spear phishing emails.
Account Has Expired and Password Reset Schemes
Another sign of a phishing attempt is when someone tells you that your account has expired or to change passwords. Change password attacks are becoming notoriously common where adversaries will ask you to key in login details via fake pages, mobile sites, and other kinds of password reset schemes.
Tiny URL Modifications
Also, watch out for tiny modifications in URLs when you interact with anyone online. mail.provider.com versus mail.update.provider.com - one of these is a phishing URL!
Unusual Requests
If you also receive uncommon or unusual requests in your emails, you may notice something is up. For example, a CEO will never ask you to transfer funds urgently and promise to pay back, without going through their regular payments approval and request process.
WiFi Twins
WiFi twin is another common phishing attack where you may connect to a WiFi that looks similar to your main company's one by accident. It exposes your internet communications to the attacker and gives them a chance to steal your sensitive data. WiFi twin phishing attacks can happen in hospitals, public zones, cafes, and other common spots.
How to Prevent Phishing Attacks: Best Practices
1. Pay Attention to the Contents and Language in Emails
Fake orders and tracking numbers in phishing emails are a clear sign someone is duping you. Look for fake addresses, phone numbers, and other credentials that look okay at first glance but don't work. Verify them.
Business email compromise (BEC) attacks can take advantage of your organization's hierarchy and impersonate executive authorities. It will impersonate officials to convince the victim into taking action.
Fake invoices are also notoriously common and may look like they're coming from legit vendors. Sometimes criminals know your invoicing schedules and email you before the vendor does, so that it appears they're coming from them.
With these three things in mind, what can you do? Pay attention, that's the first step. Especially when it comes to the language details in emails. Don't skim instructions and cross-check the contents of your messages. Don't react fast and take your time to find grammar and spelling errors and other discrepancies.
2. Conduct Phishing Drills
Many organizations carry out pretend-play scenarios or phishing drills. These are basically simulated campaigns that are done to test how your employees react. You will get a rundown of what goes into action, what doesn't work, and improvise later.
Mock phishing campaigns can help you evaluate your security posture, identify fraudulent activity, and provide positive reinforcement. Your team gets constructive feedback and your manager will be better able to spot suspicious elements in emails. All these insights will help in protecting against future phishing scams.
3. Educate and Train Your Employees
A big part of preventing phishing attacks is to encourage employees to exercise and use safe practices. Your organizations should teach your employees how to spot phishing emails. They should know what tools, workflows, and services to use. Security automation can take you only so far and you need a layer of human awareness.
Phishing awareness training should be ongoing and include informative videos and visual guides. It should provide clear steps to your employees and empower them to find, block, and contain suspicious messages.
4. Add Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
The strongest MFA options use hardware security keys or biometric authentication instead of SMS codes, which cybercriminals can sometimes intercept. Microsoft reports that MFA blocks 99.9% of automated attacks, preventing most credential-theft schemes.
You can start simple with authenticator apps on your phone, then upgrade to stronger methods as your security needs grow. Enable MFA on all accounts that support it—especially email, banking, and work systems. If someone clicks a phishing link and enters credentials on a fake login page, MFA stops them from completing the attack.
5. Use Advanced Email Filtering and Authentication
Deploy DMARC, SPF, and DKIM protocols to verify that emails come from legitimate senders. SPF tells mail systems which servers can send email for your domain, DKIM adds a digital signature to prove emails haven't been tampered with, and DMARC brings both together to show you who's sending emails claiming to be from your organization.
Set your email system to automatically block emails that fail authentication checks. When combined with user training, advanced filtering creates a strong defense that stops most phishing before it reaches employee inboxes.
6. Block Malicious Sites with DNS Filtering
When someone clicks a phishing link, DNS filtering checks if that domain is on a blocklist and refuses to connect.
Start using blocklists to identify thousands of domains linked to phishing, malware, and ransomware. Advanced DNS filters use AI to update these lists constantly, catching newly created malicious domains within hours of them going live.
7. Check Links Before You Click
Hover your mouse over a link without clicking to see where it actually goes. Attackers often hide the real destination behind display text that looks like "View Invoice" or "Verify Account". A 2023 report found that employees trained to hover before clicking were 67% less likely to click phishing links.
When you hover, look for misspelled domains or numbers replacing letters (like micros0ft.com instead of microsoft.com). Look for subdomains that don't match - for example, if the email says it's from PayPal but the link shows paypal.suspicious-login.com, that's a red flag. Check if the URL shortener hides the real destination or if the link goes to a different company's website than expected.
If you're not sure, copy the link and paste it into a text file to examine it without risking an accidental click. Go directly to the company's website by typing the URL yourself instead of clicking links in emails.
8. Keep Software Updated and Patched
Set up automatic updates for all operating systems and software whenever possible. For critical applications, test patches in a non-production environment first to catch any compatibility issues. Prioritize patches based on how severe the vulnerability is and what systems are affected.
Use automated patch management tools to scan for missing updates, test them, and deploy them across all devices.
9. Maintain Immutable Backups
Store backups offline or air-gapped from your network so ransomware can't reach them. Test your backups quarterly to make sure they actually work when you need to restore data. Organizations that test recovery regularly see 20% faster recovery times than those that don't.
Keep multiple copies of backups on different storage types and locations. If ransomware encrypts your live data, you can restore from a pristine backup without paying a ransom.
10. Restrict Access with Least Privilege
Audit user accounts and define what access each role requires. Remove unnecessary admin rights from everyday accounts.
Use role-based access control to assign permissions based on job function, then monitor for privilege creep where users accumulate extra access over time. When an employee changes roles or leaves the company, revoke their old permissions immediately.
How SentinelOne Helps in Phishing Attack Prevention?
SentinelOne can integrate with solutions like HYAS Protect to monitor and block communications to malicious domains and command-and-control (C2) infrastructure at the DNS layer. It can autonomously respond at machine speed to various threats, isolate infected endpoints, and stop harmful processes. You can rollback any changes made by malware to their pre-infected states and minimize risks.
SentinelOne's global threat intelligence will constantly keep you up-to-date with the latest phishing tactics and indicators of compromise (IOCs). You will also get the help of human experts on the team. SentinelOne's user behavior monitoring can help you find compromised accounts and look for signs of abnormal activity. You can flag suspicious behaviors and flag them for further investigation.
Singularity™ Mobile will give you on device, adaptive and real-time defenses to fight the rising tide of mobile threats. It can eliminate risks from jailbroken and rooted devices. It can help you defend against man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks, including rogue, wireless and secure communication tampering. You can block phishing URLs and behaviorally detect emerging phishing techniques. Get alerts about suspicious links in texts, messaging apps, email, and social media. Prevent credential theft and account compromise before users engage.
Singularity™ Identity can protect your identities and give you end-to-end visibility across hybrid environments to detect exposures. It can stop credential abuse and reduce identity risks. You can correlate endpoint and identity activity for context-driven detection and faster triage. Plus, it can help eliminate blind spots across siloed environments. Speed up your investigations with unified, high-fidelity alerts, and correlate evidence. It will also help you harden Active Directory and cloud identity providers, including Entra ID, Okta, Ping, SecureAuth, and Duo.
SentinelOne's behavioral engine can track system activities like file encryption, unauthorized access attempts, and correlate them into unified alerts. The platform can also scan emails for suspicious links, attachments, and work with secure email gateways to quarantine and block malicious messages before they reach your user's inbox.
If you are working with AI tools in your enterprise, Prompt Security by SentinelOne can block malicious prompts and harmful LLM responses. It can prevent adversaries from carrying out unauthorized agentic AI actions and also block denial of wallet/service attacks. Prompt Security prevents shadow AI usage, promotes ethical AI tools use, and ensures AI compliance too. SentinelOne's static and behavioral AI engines can block phishing threats, zero-days, and associated malware payloads in real-time. They're better than traditional, signature-based antivirus detections and don't let sophisticated or newer attacks pass by.
SentinelOne also prevents phishing attacks with its phased and multi-layered AI-powered security approach. You get a combination of Endpoint Protection (EPP), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), and Extended Detection and Response (XDR) capabilities.
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See how the SentinelOne threat-hunting service WatchTower can surface greater insights and help you outpace attacks.
Learn MoreConclusion
So now you know how to prevent phishing attacks. Don’t believe everything you read online and don’t click on weird clicks or open messages unless you are sure of your sources. Start incorporating these measures right away and you should start seeing results soon. Don’t act until it’s too late and stay vigilant. Defend against phishing scams and boost your cyber and cloud security today. Have SentinelOne by your side and reach out to our team for support.
FAQs
Phishing attacks are fraudulent attempts to trick people into revealing sensitive information or clicking malicious links. Attackers send emails, text messages, or create fake websites that appear legitimate. They might impersonate banks, companies, or trusted contacts. The goal is to steal credentials, personal data, or install malware on your systems. Phishing is often the entry point for ransomware and data breaches. These attacks can target individuals or entire organizations.
You can prevent phishing by training employees to identify suspicious emails and verify sender addresses. Implement email filtering and authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Use multi-factor authentication to add security even if credentials are compromised. Keep systems and software updated regularly. Create clear reporting procedures so employees feel confident reporting suspicious messages. Conduct regular security audits to identify vulnerabilities. Organizations that combine employee awareness with technical controls see the best results.
Phishing prevention stops attackers from gaining initial access to your networks. When you block phishing attempts, you prevent data theft, ransomware infections, and financial fraud. Employees who can identify phishing emails become your first line of defense. Organizations that invest in prevention avoid costly breaches and downtime. You protect customer trust and maintain compliance with security regulations. Prevention also reduces the burden on your incident response team. Strong defenses deter attackers from targeting your organization in the first place.
Email security gateways scan incoming messages for malicious links and attachments. Multi-factor authentication adds a security layer when credentials are compromised. DNS filtering blocks access to known phishing sites. User behavior analytics detect unusual account activity that signals a breach. Security awareness training platforms test employees with simulated phishing emails. SIEM solutions monitor network traffic for indicators of compromise. Organizations that deploy multiple technologies together catch more threats than relying on any single tool.
MFA doesn't prevent phishing attacks from happening, but it stops attackers from accessing accounts even if they steal credentials. When you enable MFA, login requires something you know (password) plus something you have (phone or security key). If someone falls for a phishing email and enters their password, the attacker still can't log in without the second factor. Organizations using MFA see significantly fewer successful breaches. You can use authenticator apps, security keys, or hardware tokens for MFA protection.
Organizations should conduct phishing training at least once per year, though quarterly or monthly training produces better results. You can send simulated phishing emails monthly to test and reinforce learning. New employees need training before they access company systems. Training frequency depends on your industry and risk level. If your organization has experienced phishing incidents, increase training immediately. Employees who receive regular training are far less likely to click malicious links.
AI and automation improve phishing detection by analyzing email patterns and identifying suspicious messages before they reach employees. Machine learning models recognize phishing techniques and block similar threats automatically. Automation handles routine security tasks, freeing your team for complex investigations. AI can detect when attackers try new tactics by comparing emails against known phishing signatures. However, you still need human oversight and employee training alongside these tools.
