Cybersecurity Glossary
Vishing
Phishing by telephone, increasingly using cloned voices.
What Vishing means
In a vishing call the attacker impersonates support staff, a bank's fraud team or a senior colleague, and works to create urgency. Voice cloning from a few seconds of publicly available audio has made impersonation of a specific person practical and cheap.
Why Vishing matters for small businesses and nonprofits
Voice carries authority that email does not. A call that sounds like your finance director asking for an urgent transfer is far harder to refuse than an email making the same request, particularly for a junior member of staff.
What to do about Vishing
- Agree a code word for unusual financial requests made by voice
- Hang up and call back on a number you already held, never one given during the call
- Make it explicit that no one will ever be penalised for verifying
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