What Is Phishing?

What is Phishing?

Phishing is a form of social engineering where attackers send deceptive messages to trick recipients into revealing sensitive information, clicking malicious links, or performing actions that benefit the attacker. Phishing campaigns range from broad spam runs to highly targeted attacks that impersonate coworkers, vendors, or trusted brands. Successful phishing can lead to credential theft, financial loss, and compromise of internal systems.

Phishing leverages human trust and technical loopholes. Attackers craft believable emails that mimic the look and tone of legitimate senders, then use urgency, authority, or curiosity to prompt action. Because email is both ubiquitous and relatively easy to spoof, it remains the primary vector for phishing attempts.

How Phishing Works

Phishing campaigns typically follow a sequence of reconnaissance, message crafting, delivery, and exploitation. Attackers may harvest targets from public sources, scrape social profiles for context, or buy lists from dark web marketplaces. With that information, they create messages that appear relevant and timely.

• Spoofed From addresses or lookalike domains to appear legitimate
• Malicious links that lead to credential harvesting pages or drive-by downloads
• Attachments containing malware or macros that execute when opened
• Use of compromised third-party services to host content or send mail

Advanced campaigns use multi-step flows: initial reconnaissance emails that verify active addresses, follow-ups that build trust, and final messages that request sensitive data or initiate fraudulent transfers.

Common Techniques and Targets

Phishing targets vary by attacker motive. Mass marketing-style phishing aims for volume and opportunistic fraud, while targeted attacks focus on high-value individuals or business processes.

• Spear phishing that targets specific people with personalized content
• Business email compromise that impersonates executives or vendors to request wire transfers
• Credential-phishing pages that mirror real login screens
• Quishing that uses QR codes to bypass link filtering
• Supply chain attacks that compromise trusted vendors to reach clients

Targets often include finance teams, HR, IT administrators, and customer service groups, as well as roles that can authorize payments, access sensitive records, or change account settings.

Detection and Prevention Strategies

Defending against phishing requires a layered approach combining technical controls, user training, and continuous monitoring.

• Publish and enforce SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to reduce successful spoofing
• Use multi-factor authentication to limit damage from stolen credentials
• Implement URL and attachment scanning at gateway and inbox level
• Train users to recognize red flags and verify requests out of band
• Maintain an inventory of authorized senders and monitor for lookalike domains
• Enable rapid incident response and automated takedown procedures for fraudulent sites

Regular phishing simulations and reporting workflows help measure exposure and improve user resilience over time.

Phishing and DMARCeye

DMARCeye aggregates authentication data and mailbox provider feedback to reveal phishing activity that targets your domain. By correlating SPF, DKIM, and DMARC results with sending IPs and domains, DMARCeye surfaces unauthorized senders, lookalike domains, and high-risk traffic patterns.

The platform also highlights phishing trends across providers and provides recommendations to close gaps, such as tightening DMARC enforcement, fixing DKIM key issues, or registering risky cousin domains. With these insights, organizations can reduce successful phishing attempts and protect customers, employees, and partners.

Sign up for a free trial of DMARCeye today and secure your email domain.

To learn more about DMARC and DMARC-related terms, explore the DMARCeye Glossary.