It should come as no surprise that phishing attacks continue to increase in number. They’re also becoming more sophisticated utilizing multiple methods of phishing to improve their success rate. But why is phishing used so often? Who is doing the phishing? How do you prevent it?We will discuss this in this episode of the Human Element. We review some statistics and thoughts from the below article.Global Phishing Attacks Hit A New Record in 2021 Unedited TranscriptPeople are the weakest link in any cybersecurity plan. We’re distracted, exhausted and often unmotivated. It’s time to change the approach used to protect our businesses, technology, identity and data. The human element has to be front and center in a war against data breaches and ransomware attacks, it’s time to educate.Welcome to the human element podcast, visit our website at the human element dotnet for more content to help you strengthen your awareness of the people problem in cybersecurity. I am Scott Gombar, owner and Washtech a client focused, security minded proactive IT service provider. Everyone welcome to episode seven. I am Scott Gombar. And we’re going to talk about global phishing attacks hit a new record in 2021. Before I get to that, I want to apologize and it’s been a few weeks. As you know, as you may know, if you own any business really but an IT business door ebbs and flows, and sometimes things get a little crazy. So haven’t had an opportunity to sit and record took on a new large client. So been very hectic, but here we are. And I’m reading this from software. It’s software.com. If you go to their new section, there is an article from April 27. So that’s yesterday, as I record this, that global phishing attacks hit a new record in 2021. And I’m not really surprised by this. But we’re gonna go through this nonetheless. And I will point out some things that that I think are important here, so global phishing attacks have hit a new high and 2021. As a new attack as new attack vectors and phishing as a service methods emerged. One of the reasons that this type of attack grows in prevalence every year is its low barrier to entry. Meaning, it’s not hard to send a phishing email, I could send a phishing, I don’t even need anything really to send a phishing email, just open up a fake Google account or a fake Outlook account or whatever. People are still using Hotmail, AOL free cable company email, or ISP, email, all of these things are still being used in then send a phishing email. I’ve literally done this to teach people what to look for. Moreover, cyber criminals take advantage of current events such as COVID-19 pandemic or cryptocurrency to trick victims to hand over their confidential data. Now, of course, we have a war in Ukraine. And the tools that are used to do a lot of this are actually available free to our Linux distributions that include these tools or if you’re inclined, you can download some of the tools and install them on your computer even if you use Windows download VirtualBox and and install kali linux or or parrot on your virtual box and use it from there. And they’re free to use and they’re not hard to learn. And that is what is meant by low barrier to entry. Now, a lot of times the phishing attacks are pretty obvious, you get emails that, you know, the grammar is really bad. And the links are poorly written and it’s sent to a whole bunch of people. And if you pay attention to where it came from, it came from a Gmail address. And if you go to the Nightwatch tech YouTube page, you’ll see a lot of phishing attack emails that we review.