Reports of a near-perfect phishing attempt have surfaced after a large number of remote employees with health and work environment benefits through human resources giant TriNet received such emails.
The emails were shared with TechCrunch, an American online publisher, in order to 'verify their authenticity' and when two independent security researchers were approached to offer their evaluations, both were of the view that it was a phishing email indeed contrived to steal usernames and passwords.
Furthermore, even a $3.7 billion corporation like TriNet, let alone the other big giants are not doing what's needed to counteract such phishing attack on the grounds that had they proactively utilized basic email security techniques, it would have been significantly simpler to identify that the email was not in actuality a phish, but an authentic company email.
Anyway, the issue isn't even a new one for TriNet or for that matter any other big company.
For instance just the previous year, security firm Agari discovered that only 14% of all Fortune 500 companies were utilizing DMARC, a domain security feature that prevents 'email spoofing' and effectively implements it and the new data provided by Agari to TechCrunch shows that figure has risen to just a single percentage point in the last year, bringing it to a small 15%.
Nonetheless, it’s safe to assume that both phishing and impersonation are 'fundamentally' human issues with the intent to attempt to fool clueless victims into turning over their usernames, email addresses and passwords to hackers who at that point login and steal data or money. On that account, it is recommended for the users to always be vigilant when they are at the receiving end of such emails.
