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Phishing and Social Engineering Protection

In 2026, social engineering is no longer just about suspicious emails; it involves AI-driven voice cloning and hyper-personalized deepfakes. Defending against these attacks requires a shift from 'looking for errors' to a Zero-Trust verification model.

Key defensive trends include:
• Credential Masking: Using email aliases to ensure your 'true' address is never exposed.
• Hardware-Backed MFA: Moving to FIDO2/WebAuthn keys, which are phishing-resistant because the credential is bound to the site's origin.
• Out-of-Band Verification: Using separate, secure channels (like Signal) to verify 'urgent' requests from family or colleagues.
• Fresh Blocklists: Phishing URLs live for hours, not weeks, so DNS and mail filtering need feeds such as URLhaus and OpenPhish rather than a static list.

Related Articles

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Phishing & Social Engineering Sep 08, 2026

Phishing Left the Inbox: QR Codes, Adversary-in-the-Middle Kits, and the ASCII Trick

QR code phishing rose 146% in the first quarter of 2026, and the reason is structural: a QR code hands the attack to a phone, where the mail gateway, the proxy, and the endpoint agent all stop watching. Now an eighth of them are not images at all.

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Resources

Gophish

An open-source phishing simulation framework for running your own awareness campaigns. The latest release is v0.12.1 from September 2022, so check that the project is still maintained before adopting it for a new programme.

Addy.io (formerly AnonAddy)

A transparent, open-source email forwarding service that allows you to create alias-based identities on the fly, preventing your real identity from being harvested by data brokers.

URLhaus (abuse.ch)

A free, community-operated feed of malicious URLs from abuse.ch, focused on malware distribution and payload hosting. It is useful for blocklists and enrichment; pair it with the phishing-specific OpenPhish feed below.

Proton Mail

Includes PhishGuard, which blocks known phishing attempts and warns about suspicious messages, plus Link Confirmation so you can inspect a link before visiting it.

Google Phishing Quiz

A Jigsaw quiz that walks through realistic emails and asks you to spot the phishing cues, such as mismatched sender addresses, lookalike links and manufactured urgency.

CISA Phishing Guidance

Joint CISA, NSA, FBI and MS-ISAC guidance for network defenders and software manufacturers on breaking the phishing attack cycle early, covering common techniques and controls such as phishing-resistant MFA, email authentication and reporting.

KnowBe4

A massive commercial library of security awareness training and automated phishing simulations, best suited for large-scale corporate compliance.

OpenPhish

A phishing-specific URL feed that concentrates on credential-harvesting pages rather than malware payloads. The community feed is free and refreshed every 12 hours under a non-commercial licence; the paid feeds update more often and add context.