Victims hit by GDPR phishing scam!

Today, after years of discussion and anticipation among businesses, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is finally coming into effect. This act is designed to provide a higher level of security with data usage to ensure that businesses responsibly handle data. However, in an ironic turn of events, scammers are using this opportunity to gain access to bank details of unsuspecting victims using phishing scams.

According to the Independent, UK customers of the bank Natwest have been targeted by the scammers, who have been sending fraudulent emails claiming to be from the bank. Through the use of fake emails, scammers have contacted customers informing them that their accounts could be terminated if they do not update their records, at which point they are directed to a site that steals any data they input.

It is unfortunate that a step forward for better data protection has resulted in scammers seeing an opportunity to take advantage of people, however, this is the nature of phishing attacks and a reason for their prevalent use. Fortunately, there are a number of innovative companies and bright minds working to keep us safe from these scammers’ dastardly tricks.

Phish.AI, a next-generation anti-phishing technology company, has announced the launch of PhishProtect Alert on the 1st of June. The product gives businesses real-time data about potential phishing activity and alerts them when a suspicious, potentially copycat website has been launched. This enables this business to stop a phishing attack before it happens. 

Phish.AI’s mission is to become a one-stop-shop for phishing detection and prevention solutions. It is the only company that has combined the powers of AI and computer vision technologies to combat phishing. ‘Computer vision’ refers to a program’s ability to acquire, process and analyze digital images. With the launch of PhishProtect Alert, Phish.AI now has three specialized products with a variety of applications in today’s complex digital enterprise infrastructure.

By monitoring certificate transparency logs from around the world with more than 350 million certificates, PhishProtect Alert gives business owners the ability to search for and subscribe to websites with domain names similar to theirs. The certificate transparency logs are stored on a database on Google BigQuery, which users can access and run queries on for free, since it is public. They are only charged per Google BigQuery cloud pricing. By making the certificate transparency log more accessible, Phish.AI has effectively made malicious attacks more difficult for phishers to execute.

“With the launch of PhishProtect, Phish.AI now enables its new and current users to proactively get alerts about phishing urls, suspicious domains and create entirely new use-cases and custom queries by working with the public raw database,” said Phish.AI CEO Yevgeny Pats. “We are excited to empower businesses with the most advanced anti-phishing technology to defend against the rising number of phishing attacks.”

Phish.AI developed  PhishProtect Alert with an awareness of the urgency business owners have in combating cyberattacks on their clients. In fact, phishing attempts have risen by 65% over the 12 months, with some 76% of businesses reporting being a victim to a phishing attack during that time. About 1.5 million new phishing sites are created every month, and it’s because they are incredibly profitable for hackers. A single phishing attack costs a mid-size company about $1.6 million on average. By 2023, the global cyber security market is expected to be valued at $165.2 billion at a compound annual growth rate of 10.7%.

No company or vertical is immune to phishing. Phish.AI has developed PhishProtect Alert and its other products — PhishProtect Browser and PhishProtect API — with this reality in mind. The company’s aim is to create a more open, AI-driven, anti-phishing ecosystem to help businesses of every kind and size to fight phishing attacks.

As we continue to embrace technology, these types of attacks are unlikely to disappear soon. Let us hope that acts we introduce and companies fighting to protect us can continue to keep us safe from villenous criminals phishing for our data.