By: James Hickey and Carolyn Cushwa, Cofense
Vishing, or "voice phishing," continues to be a silent yet formidable cyber threat for businesses of all sizes. While traditional phishing and smishing (SMS phishing) are widely recognized, vishing often flies under the radar, leaving organizations vulnerable to devastating attacks. With the increasing reliance on phone and remote communications in today's business environment, organizations need to take proactive measures to guard their operations against vishing scams.
Here’s what you need to know about vishing, how it targets businesses, and how Cofense can help you secure this overlooked attack vector.
What is Vishing and Why is It a Growing Threat?
Vishing is a social engineering tactic in which cybercriminals use phone calls or voice recordings to trick victims into providing sensitive information or transferring funds. To do this, threat actors will often disguise themselves as representatives of legitimate institutions, such as banks, government agencies, or even a company’s own IT department.
The attacks start in most cases with an attacker sending a phishing email to victims with an emotive call-to-action to dial a phone number in the email. Vishing emails can easily bypass traditional security measures, like SEGs, because the contents of the email do not contain malicious, detectable links.
When the victim calls the number, they are often using personal devices, bypassing corporate security controls, and talking directly with the threat actors. These calls may be used by threat actors for reconnaissance of your organization, allowing attackers to gather details about your organization’s operations, personnel, or other sensitive information. Following the call, they may follow up with emails to the victim that contain further instructions or links to click on, to deepen the scope of the attack.
Alternatively, they may simply direct the victim to a URL over the phone, allowing the attacker to steal their credentials or other sensitive data while avoiding a plethora of email security controls.
In some cases, the attacker is targeting the end-user directly, tricking them into revealing personal information that can be used for a deeper, more personal attack. In other scenarios, attackers obtain phone numbers from other nefarious sources and call the user directly to initiate the scam. This can be harder to execute due to the need to have hard, reliable data on the user and their phone number to mount a convincing campaign, so these attacks are less common but do still occur with alarming frequency.
Key Characteristics of a Vishing Attack:
- Caller ID Spoofing: Attackers dialing directly use fake phone numbers to appear as trusted organizations.
- Voice-Mimicking Software: Scammers replicate trusted voices to gain credibility while on the phone with victims.
- Urgency Exploits: By instilling fear or urgency, cybercriminals pressure employees into dialing the number in the initial phishing email, or later in the attack while on the phone, into quick, unverified actions, such asproviding login credentials or initiating financial transfers.
Vishing attacks often target business-critical data, such as financial credentials, employee IDs, or customer information. Once stolen, these details can be used for further breaches, ransomware attacks, or company-wide financial theft. Extracting information from an end-user over the phone also helps the threat actors avoid any DLP controls or data exfiltration protections you may have in place, simply because it’s a voice call occurring over a personal device and not data traversing your corporate network.
An Unseen Threat to Businesses
Unlike phishing emails that leave digital trails, vishing often goes undetected until significant damage is done. The anonymity of phone scams makes it harder for businesses to track and contain these attacks unless preventive measures are already in place.
No matter how robust an organization's cybersecurity infrastructure is, its employees still play a critical role in defense. Without adequate training, even the most seasoned professionals can fall victim to sophisticated attacks.
The Cofense Solution to Combat Vishing
To address the growing threat of vishing scams, Cofense offers our Call-Back Phishing managed service, an advanced extension to our PhishMe Security Awareness Training (SAT) platform. This feature provides businesses with a robust, proactive approach to vishing mitigation.
How Cofense’s Call-Back Phishing Managed Service Enhances Your Security:
- Fast Implementation: Seamlessly integrate call-back phishing training into your existing SAT program.
- Customized Security Awareness Content: Tailored content ensures your training materials reflect real-world scenarios your business may face, making employees well-prepared for potential vishing threats.
- Interactive Voice Response (IVR) in Any Language: Multilingual support allows businesses to simulate attacks in their employees' primary language, creating realistic training that enhances their ability to spot scams.
- Remediation Training for Employees: Employees who fall victim to simulated vishing attempts are re-trained using engaging, context-specific lessons designed to improve vulnerability awareness.
- Comprehensive Reporting: Robust post-simulation reports offer valuable insights into employee performance and your organization's readiness, demonstrating the tangible impact of your SAT efforts overall, and specifically as they relate to vishing.
Combatting advanced phishing threats such as vishing requires a layered approach. Cofense empowers businesses to tackle these challenges directly through engaging educational content, proactive simulations, and ongoing optimization. Cofense’s Call-Back Phishing simulations provide employees with practical, hands-on training while delivering invaluable insights to your cybersecurity team on overall readiness.
Strengthen your business' cybersecurity posture today with Cofense's Call-Back Phishing managed service. Contact us for a demo and see how our solutions can safeguard your organization's future.