Phishing attacks are becoming more regular than ever before. The worrying thing is that they are also becoming more successful, with people finding it difficult to differentiate a genuine email from a hacker's attempt. The scammers are becoming more intelligent about who they target and how they target them. 

The most common types of attacks are explained in detail here. Tax cons are amongst the most common types of phishing attack. Fraudulent tax sites seem to be conning people out of money across the world.

Here are just some examples of phishing attacks that have happened in the last few months:

Seagate Technology

A phishing email recently tricked an employee at Seagate Technology into giving away some tax documents on all current and past employees. These documents contained social security numbers, salaries, and personal information. Several thousand employees were affected. It was a major phishing attack that left many people vulnerable.

Snapchat

Social media site Snapshat were targeted in early March. One of its employees was specifically targeted for payroll information about its employees. The scammer impersonated the company’s CEO. This could be classed as a 'whaling attack' - an attack which is specific in its approach and can cause large scale damage. The scammers specifically found the details of the payroll department and found ways to convince the person in question that they were indeed the CEO of the company. This differs from a traditional 'phishing attack’ where many messages are sent out to a bulkier volume of customers, with no specific targeting taking place.

Wonga

An example of a more ‘traditional’ phishing attack could be Wonga’s case where no data breach of customer information actually occurred. Contact information of thousands of people were leaked from an as yet unidentified source and hackers simply used the Wonga brand as a ‘mask’ to contact these people pretending to be from the legitimate loan company with a ‘too good to be true’ loan offer on a fake website. Wonga set up a fraud hotline to deal with the mis-use of their image and to assist customers who were affected by the fraudulent text messages and emails.

There are many more examples of companies that have been targeted by scammers. Apple is another large scale corporation that have struggled to crack down on the constant phishing emails being sent out to iTunes customers across the world. The smaller companies don’t escape, either- essentially, if a scammer knows about you, they may try and target you or your clients.

It seems that to help combat the problem, we should educate ourselves on how to identify such a scam so that you don’t respond in the first place. Take a look at wikihow’s advice on spotting a fraudulent email. Be wise to any emails that come from unusual URLs and always question the content of the email. If the scammer wants you to pay a sum of money for something, it could well be suspicious.