How to Prevent Phishing Emails and Keep Your Business Safe

Phishing emails remain one of the most dangerous and common forms of cyberattacks today. These deceptive messages are designed to trick recipients into clicking malicious links, downloading harmful attachments, or revealing sensitive information, such as passwords, credit card numbers, and bank account details. For small to mid-sized businesses, a successful phishing attempt can result in significant financial losses, compromised client trust, and potential legal consequences.

Fortunately, with the right tools, employee training, and security infrastructure in place, you can significantly reduce the risk of falling victim to these schemes. In this guide, we’ll explore how phishing emails work, common phishing tactics, and—most importantly—how to prevent phishing emails from reaching your inbox and disrupting your business.

What Are Phishing Emails?

Phishing emails are fraudulent messages that impersonate trusted senders like banks, vendors, executives, or coworkers. The aim is to trick you into actions that compromise security, such as entering credentials on a spoofed site or downloading malware. Attackers often add urgency or fear to bypass critical thinking, for example, by claiming your account is suspended or a high-value transaction was initiated.

Phishing remains a widespread and growing issue. The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG)observed 1,130,393 phishing attacks in Q2 2025, a 13% increase from 1,003,924 attacks in Q1 2025, marking the largest quarterly total since mid-2023. In Q1 2025, attacks targeting online payments and banking collectively accounted for 30.9% of all incidents, underscoring the continued pressure on financial workflows. APWG also reports a surge in QR-code phishing, with criminals sending millions of emails that embed QR codes leading to fake sites or malware.

These trends reinforce a simple takeaway. Treat unexpected messages that ask you to click a link, scan a QR code, or verify credentials as suspicious, even when they look familiar.

Common Types of Phishing Attacks

To understand how to prevent phishing emails, it’s essential to recognize the most common types of phishing scams used by attackers:

1. Spear Phishing

Spear phishing is a highly targeted form of phishing that tailors the message to a specific individual or organization. Unlike generic spam, spear phishing emails often appear to come from someone the recipient knows, such as a manager or colleague. These emails may request sensitive data, fund transfers, or access to internal systems.

For example, a spear phishing email may pretend to be from your HR department, requesting updated banking information for payroll purposes.

2. Email Spoofing

Email spoofing occurs when an attacker forges the “From” address in an email to make it appear as if it’s from a trusted source. These emails can be particularly difficult to detect on mobile devices, where full email addresses are often hidden. Recipients may unknowingly respond to the email or click a malicious link.

3. Credential Phishing

This technique tricks users into revealing their usernames and passwords. Often, phishing emails link to a fake login page that closely mimics a legitimate website, such as Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or a popular cloud service. Once the user submits their credentials, attackers gain access to the victim’s account, including email, files, shared drives, calendars, and any connected apps or cloud resources. That access can enable unauthorized data downloads, mailbox rules for fraud, privilege escalation, lateral movement inside the tenant, and identity theft.

4. Smishing (SMS Phishing)

Phishing delivered by text message. Attackers use urgent prompts about deliveries, bank alerts, or account issues and include a short link or phone number that leads to credential theft or malware.

5. Vishing (Voice Phishing)

Phone calls or voicemails that impersonate banks, tech support, or internal staff. Callers pressure victims to share one-time passcodes, install “support” software, or approve fraudulent transactions.

6. Quishing (QR-Code Phishing)

Emails, posters, or printed handouts with QR codes that send users to spoofed login pages or malware downloads. The QR step helps attackers evade some email link filters.

7. Business Email Compromise (BEC)

A targeted fraud that uses a real or convincingly spoofed business email account to request wire transfers, gift cards, or sensitive files. BEC often involves account takeover, careful pretexting, and timing messages to match real business processes like invoicing or payroll.

How to Prevent Phishing Emails: 6 Effective Strategies

While phishing attacks are constantly evolving, your defenses can evolve just as quickly. Below are six essential strategies to help prevent phishing emails from compromising your business:

1. Educate Your Employees

The first and most critical step in preventing phishing emails is ongoing employee education and training. Human error is the most common vulnerability exploited in phishing attacks.

Your team should be trained to:

• Recognize suspicious sender addresses and grammatical errors.
• Avoid clicking links in unsolicited emails or text messages.
• Verify unusual requests, such as sudden wire transfers or password resets, through another channel.
• Verify the presence of HTTPS and valid SSL certificates on login pages.
• Report phishing emails to your IT or security team as soon as possible.

Regular phishing simulations and refresher courses can help keep employees alert and informed.

2. Strengthen Authentication Policies

Strong password hygiene is your next line of defense. Many phishing attacks succeed because stolen or reused passwords give hackers immediate access to internal systems.

Implement these best practices:

• Use strong passwords: At least 12 to 16 characters in length, with a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols.
• Make every password unique: Prohibit reuse across systems and shared accounts.
• Adopt multi-factor authentication (MFA): Require MFA for all users, prioritizing phishing-resistant methods such as FIDO2 security keys or platform passkeys.
• Leverage a password manager: Provide an approved password manager that allows users to generate and store long, unique passwords for every site and app.
• Protect admin access: Require MFA and just-in-time elevation for privileged roles, and restrict legacy protocols that bypass modern auth.
• Monitor and respond: Enable alerts for suspicious logins, impossible travel, and repeated MFA prompts, and enforce rapid credential resets when compromise is suspected.

3. Implement Email Filtering and Threat Detection Tools

Advanced email security software can help filter out phishing emails before they ever reach your team. Look for tools that offer:

• Real-time link scanning
• Attachment sandboxing
• AI-based detection of phishing patterns
• URL rewriting to detect redirects or spoofing
• Threat intelligence feeds to block known bad domains

These tools can significantly reduce your exposure and serve as a first layer of defense.

4. Encrypt Sensitive Data

Encryption makes it difficult for attackers to use stolen data. All sensitive files—such as personal or financial information, customer databases, and employee records—should be encrypted both in transit and at rest.

This ensures that even if a phishing attack is successful, the exposed data remains unreadable and unusable without the proper encryption keys.

5. Keep Software and Systems Up to Date

Outdated software is a major security risk. Cybercriminals often exploit known vulnerabilities in older versions of operating systems, email clients, and plugins.

Maintain a strict patch management schedule across:

• Operating systems
• Antivirus and anti-malware tools
• Web browsers
• Email clients
• Any third-party integrations

Updating to newer software versions, where possible, can help eliminate this risk.

6. Protective DNS Solutions

Protective DNS (PDNS) blocks connections to known malicious domains at the DNS layer, cutting off access to phishing sites, malware delivery, and command-and-control before a page even loads. Solutions like ThreatSTOP apply continuously updated threat intelligence to your DNS resolvers, firewalls, and endpoints, enforcing policy-based blocks and providing visibility into attempted lookups. ThreatSTOP is an effective way to reduce the impact of phishing and related threats across your environment.

7. Partner with Cybersecurity Experts

If you don’t have a dedicated IT security team, consider outsourcing to a trusted cybersecurity provider. A proactive partner can help:

• Monitor your network for suspicious activity
• Perform regular phishing vulnerability assessments
• Create custom policies to mitigate your risks
• Implement secure email gateways and backup solutions

Working with a provider like EIRE Systems ensures that your business has the expertise and tools needed to defend against evolving phishing threats.

Signs of a Phishing Email: What to Watch Out For

Here are some common signs that an email might be part of a phishing attack:

• The sender’s email address looks slightly off or unfamiliar.
• The email contains urgent language (“Immediate action required!”).
• Hyperlinks don’t match the visible text or point to misspelled domains.
• Unexpected attachments are included.
• The phishing messages have poor grammar or awkward phrasing.
• Requests for sensitive information, such as personal or financial details, often originate from unexpected or suspicious sources.
• The message contains a single large image that looks like normal text and buttons, but the entire image is clickable and sends you to a fake site. Hovering appears safe because it looks like plain text, yet it is actually an image with a hidden link.

When in doubt, it’s best to verify the request directly with the sender through a phone call, a known email address, or an internal chat.

EIRE Systems: Helping You Prevent Phishing Emails

Phishing attacks are not going away, but with the right prevention strategies, they don’t have to derail your business. At EIRE Systems, we specialize in helping companies prevent phishing emails and build resilient IT environments that can withstand modern cyber threats.

Whether you need employee training, email filtering tools, data encryption, or full-scale IT security management, our team can help you design a solution tailored to your needs.

Ready to level up your email security? Contact EIRE Systems to discover how we can help safeguard your business against phishing threats.

Sources:

1. Anti-Phishing Working Group. (2025, July 2). Phishing activity trends report: 1st quarter 2025. https://docs.apwg.org/reports/apwg_trends_report_q1_2025.pdf
2. Anti-Phishing Working Group. (2025, August 28). Phishing activity trends report: 2nd quarter 2025. https://docs.apwg.org/reports/apwg_trends_report_q2_2025.pdf
3. Anti-Phishing Working Group. (n.d.). Phishing activity trends reports. Retrieved October 16, 2025, from https://apwg.org/trendreports