S2 EP3: Your Phishing Radar Is Outdated

Hi, guys.

To answer Joy's question, or rather to bring a view to this discussion, I would say phishing still exploits human vulnerability.

And the fact is, no matter how much you train people to detect even the traditional phishing attacks, as they're not the ones with the emergence of AI, they still fall prey to phishing attacks because it exploits the human nature.

It exploits your anxiety, exploits your greed, if you have one, exploits different areas of human nature.

That's why it's still very valid, even years to come, after so much evolution of humans and tech in general.

Okay, I would say that another reason why, I think, is because we know that the whole phishing is, you know, poor grammar, you know, things that you can be able to see at first glance.

I think the most important reason why it is so relevant is because attackers have studied human behavior so well.

We are basically predictable.

Even if technologies advance, technologies advance very rapidly.

human psychology still, we don't advance as rapidly as them.

So our psychology, once it's studied, our human behavior, I think attackers tend to, you know, exploit, tend to exploit okay, how we trust somebody, the authority on how we see people, our views, our relationship.

I think that's what attackers, you know, exploit upon.

And basically, you know, when you see a phishing email or a phishing campaign, you're basically just thinking what's next.

And for humans, what a lot for decision-making, basically.

Emotional decision-making as well.

So when we see something immediately, our thinking is just, we need a quick solution ASAP, instead of looking at settling down, calming ourselves, and thinking logically and rationally.

So I think that attackers make use of that quick decision making we do at that particular time, which makes us irrational.

And I think that's what they feed on.

What do you think, Josiah?

I mean, yeah, I do largely agree.

I feel like fishing is more so exploiting human psychology than even a lot of the technical things.

And I think Chinaza said something that I also want to just touch on a bit.

It's the fact that with... you know like hard-coded systems like they're hard-coded right and these things are already in place and it's not changing but with people for instance someone might not be you know susceptible to fishing today but could be susceptible to fishing tomorrow you understand because the human like emotions can change right you know something can happen at that time that can make you you know four for fishing but you typically would not do you understand so i think that's that's i just wanted to add that a bit of context into why fishing can generally be quite effective

And I think, trust me, some cybersecurity professionals still fall victim to phishing emails.

Because just like Josiah said, one minute you're not vulnerable, the next minute you are.