Did you know that cyberattacks occur approximately once every 39 seconds? Over 25,000 websites are attacked daily across the globe. Such worrisome cybersecurity stats could easily raise panic. Fortunately, organizations can now prevent themselves from cyber-attacks by following strict cybersecurity policies. Among the several types of cyber-attacks faced by companies, phishing attacks are the most common. The number of phishing attacks on corporate firms has drastically increased in 2021. Phishing attacks can compromise security of the IT infrastructure and lower service availability. To overcome phishing attacks, many organizations are placing their trust in AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations). Read on to know how one can gain protection against phishing attacks with AIOps.

Phishing: definition and statistics

Before we learn what AIOps-enabled cyber security and compliance services can do, it is important to understand what a phishing attack is. Alluring emails are sent to an individual or an organization via fake email addresses in phishing attacks. The attackers send fraudulent emails with the aim of gaining access to sensitive information. Due to phishing attacks, business organizations have lost money and sensitive data. Once someone gains critical business information via a phishing attack, your systems become vulnerable and, service availability might decrease.

Besides sending fake emails, phishing attackers use many other techniques to gain access to sensitive information. Some of the popular phishing types for business organizations are given below:

• Email phishing: It is one of the most common types of phishing attacks experienced by business organizations. Fake emails are made to look like valid ones in an attempt to steal credential information.
• Malware phishing: Attackers send fake emails to business organizations with an infected attachment/link. Once you download the attachment, your system will be compromised, and service availability will take a hit.
• Spear phishing: Besides targeting a corporate individual, spear phishing targets a group of corporate individuals. Attackers communicate in a way with company employees that appears to be authentic. It is usually done to get into an organization’s internal network and make way for further cyber-attacks.
• Vishing: In vishing, an attacker pretends to be a customer support executive or tech support person for any reputed organization. He then extracts the credential information from the customers and hampers the reputation of the organization.

One may think that one fraudulent email isn’t going to deplete the service availability completely. However, the magnitude of phishing attacks is much more than your expectations. Business organizations are always at risk when it comes to phishing attacks. Also, the taxonomy of phishing attacks is increasing as cyber attackers are discovering new ways. Some worrisome stats that will make you reconsider your security practices are as follows:

• More than 90% of people cannot identify a phishing attack.
• A study on around 55 million emails was conducted to determine the frequency of phishing attacks. It was observed that one email for every 99 emails was an attempted phishing attack.
• More than 40% of all emails on the globe are attempted phishing attacks.
• More than ten billion phishing emails are forwarded by attackers every day.

Challenges in dealing with phishing attacks

One can analyse from the statistics mentioned earlier that the magnitude of phishing attacks is very high. Detecting phishing attacks on a large scale is not possible with solely manual labor. Even if cybersecurity experts detect phishing attacks, it is too late as the service availability is already compromised. Business organizations find it hard to detect phishing attacks in real-time. Another challenge is to monitor the device/endpoint behavior round-the-clock to detect phishing attacks.

Communication data has also to be monitored 24*7 as phishing attacks can occur anytime. Dealing with phishing attacks is a bigger challenge amidst the remote work culture due to the recent pandemic. As organizations scale their IT infrastructure, more software systems and endpoints need to be monitored. Manual monitoring on such a large scale is impossible for system administrators and cybersecurity experts. It is why business organizations are looking for automation in cybersecurity with the use of AI/ML and predictive analytics models. AIOps-enabled real time user monitoring tools are being used by many organizations to prevent phishing attacks.

How do AIOps-led solutions protect organizations from phishing attacks?

AIOps based analytics platforms will reduce the need for manual labor for preventing phishing attacks. AI/ML algorithms don’t make human errors that are the main reason for successful phishing attacks. The best cyber security services companies have started making monitoring tools that can provide real-time alerts. How AIOps-enabled cybersecurity solution prevents phishing attacks are as follows:

• AIOps based analytics platforms will collect communication data across the entire IT infrastructure. Communication between software systems, endpoints, and end-user devices can be rigorously monitored with an AIOps-led cybersecurity solution.
• AIOps remembers the approved communication behavior. If the communication becomes abnormal, AIOps quickly identifies and sends an alert to the cybersecurity teams.
• If an attacker has entered your organization’s network, AIOps can help you identify the intruder. AIOps based analytics platforms have the power to monitor the behavior of network devices round-the-clock.
• AIOps offers you rich observability into your IT network and software systems. Whenever a software system or user device shows abnormal behavior, AIOps generates an alert.
• AIOps can also help business organizations in determining the impact of any cyberattack. Based on their impacts, you can resolve high-impact cyber-attacks first as they can deplete service availability.
• AIOps helps in conducting DPI (Deep Packet Inspection). The data being send over to the devices and systems in your organization will be inspected thoroughly.
• If a phishing attack occurs, an AIOps-enabled cybersecurity solution will quickly identify the source/root cause of the attack

Conclusion

By using AIOps based analytics platforms, a business organization can automate several cybersecurity activities. You can detect abnormal user behavior, communication channel, and system activity in real-time with an AIOps-enabled cybersecurity solution. All this can be done with the least manual support by AIOps-led cybersecurity tools. Prevent your organizations from phishing attacks with AIOps-led monitoring tools!