29
Jan 2012

Overview of the Current State of Phishing Attacks published in Communications of the ACM

Jason Hong

JasonH's survey article of phishing attacks was recently published in the Communications of the ACM.

Link to CACM article

Phishing is a kind of social-engineering attack in which criminals use spoofed email messages to trick people into sharing sensitive information or installing malware on their computers. Victims perceive these messages as being associated with a trusted brand, while in reality they are only the work of con artists. Rather than directly target the systems people use, phishing attacks target the people using the systems. Phishing cleverly circumvents the vast majority of an organization's or individual's security measures. It doesn't matter how many firewalls, encryption software, certificates, or two-factor authentication mechanisms an organization has if the person behind the keyboard falls for a phish.