Vishing is a new important word which is good to know. It’s not important to know the word but it is important to know what is behind this word.
The word vishing was made by combination of the words voice and phishing. You probably heard about phishing and you probably even had some phishing emails in your mailbox. The fake emails that want you to enter your bank account credentials are only small part of the phishing. Phishing together with social engineering can make devastating damages – stole money from your bank account, stole sensitive data from your computer or hack whole company network. Phishing can convince you to install harmful application. If you are lucky the application would only use your computer for mining cryptocurrency or sending spam. But the application may stole the sensitive data or encrypt computers and require ransom for decrypting.
Vishing takes the phishing methods to a new level. We got used to phishing, we are careful with emails and we learn how to recognize phishing and deal with it. Vishing is a new threat that we have no experience with yet. If you get a call and somebody would have enough precise non-public information, they will easily convince you of their authenticity and force you to divulge confidential information or take actions you would not otherwise take. Unfortunately, just as we have learned not to trust the authenticity of email, we will have to learn not to trust phone calls.