Trust is a very important part of any relationship and once it's been established, you ignore all the traps of that person. After you trust somebody, you do not think twice, and reply to all the mails and messages sent by the trusted person.

But what if I told you that this trust will be abused by an hacker or attacker with you and how?. An attacker who will ride on this trust to form you are doing one thing they require, like downloading malware.One of the many flavors of phishing out there does just this — clone phishing.

This article can explore clone phishing. We’ll inspect what clone phishing is, the various sorts of clone phishing, however you'll be able to spot clone phishing and what you'll be able to do to avoid victim to what has been known as the foremost harmful kind of phishing.

What is clone phishing?

If the name conjures images of fish cloning or “Star Wars” movies, i need to disappoint you. Instead, clone phishing refers to the e-mail or message employed by attackers.

As mentioned earlier, trust is large in business relationships, and this will affect tasks that appear relatively insignificant to the involved parties like readily responding to emails and messages. Attackers are cognizant that this trust relationship is an important a part of an email producing the sender’s desired effect, and that they use clone phishing to require advantage of this relationship.

The different types of clone phishing

OK, so you get that the essential trust in a business relationship is abused in clone phishing. But what does a clone phishing email look like? There are three different types of clone phishing emails:

• An email sent from a spoofed email address intended to trick the recipient into thinking it is from a legitimate sender
• An email containing a link or attachment that has been replaced with a malicious link or attachment

• An email or message that claims to be from a recent email from a legitimate sender but is updated in some way

Think about it this way: if you're sitting at your desk during a busy workday and you receive an email from a private that you simply trust, you'll presumably suit whatever request the email has got to keep the continuity of workflow going. When phishers cash in on this, it's kind of like an abuse of system feature attack — but during this case, the system is you!

Phishers can also use clone phishing to pivot from a previously infected system and gain a foothold on other systems in an organization by abusing this trust.

Due to using a solid anti-spam solution, I don’t have any examples of a clone phishing email to present for you all. However, just a few years ago when I did not use this solution I remember encountering at least one of these emails a month. They often purported to be from a trusted business but were riddled with URL mismatches and sometimes even humorous “pron” spam email misspellings and grammatical errors.

“!Sometimes life is about finding humor in little things like these!”

How to spot clone phishing

There are some tell-tale signs of clone phishing that ought to stand bent anyone with a minimal eye for detail.

• URL mismatches: This refers to mismatches or discrepancies between the particular links and therefore the displaced URLs. a method to verify if they match is to easily hover over the link to ascertain where it leads.
• Impersonated domains.
• Apparent and actual sender mismatches: this will be determined by the sender name being off in how. repeatedly, the particular sender is going to be somebody entirely different.
• Suspicious email misspellings, grammatical errors and other “phishy” mistakes that a legitimate sender wouldn't make.

What can you do to avoid becoming a clone phishing victim?

The good thing is that there are variety of measures you'll fancy to make sure you don't fall victim to a clone phishing scheme.

• Cybersecurity education for end users: this is often the highest thanks to prevent clone phishing from claiming another victim at your organization, because the user is that the last line of defense within the face of phishing. Once you recognize what to seem for, the facility is indeed in your hands to prevent it.
• Anti-spam software: this is often one among the simplest ways to stop clone phishing because it'll simply filter emails that look “phishy” ad infinitum users or the organization administrator having to believe it.
• Firewalls/threat management solutions: this is often another “not need to believe it” solution which will add the background to seem for mismatched URLs and sender discrepancies which will indicate clone phishing
• Contact the sender: Call the sender and ask whether the email is legitimate. this is often my favorite method of prevention, because it provides notification to the opposite legitimate party

Conclusion

Clone phishing may be a sort of phishing that has been said to be the foremost harmful sort of phishing. This heightened risk of harm comes from the very fact that an user is more likely to trust an email from a trusted sender that appears just like others they need received during this past. The scary thing is that only one click of a malicious link during this cloned email is all it's going to fancy compromise a system and potentially other systems also.

By following the fairly straightforward ways to identify and stop clone phishing emails, your organization are going to be far less likely to fall victim.