The human factor is an essential part of phishing attacks. Threat actors often rely on this factor to target users and attack them. Most people have the tendency to be curious and to quickly develop trust with others. Attackers take advantage of these characteristics in people to create phishing emails in a way which raises curiosity among users and then takes that trust to pull in users.
There are four main human characteristics that threat actors use to target users: natural curiosity, high-stress levels, human desire to help others, and lack of cyber crime awareness. Cyber criminals use simple techniques like creating a sense of urgency to manipulate human emotion.
It is critical that organizations train their employees to be able to detect phishing attacks and create an awareness among their employees. The average number of email phishing attack increased 120% in 2018 from the year before.
To learn more, read the full article and view the full infographic at our partner SymbolSecurity’s blog: https://symbolsecurity.com/2019/05/07/email-phishing-attacks-human-factor/.
