On March 23, 2018, WIRED published this article

“According to the Justice Department, many of the network intrusions began with sophisticated “spear-phishing” campaigns, with emails to target professors appearing to come from fellow academics at other schools. Links in the emails would direct the professors to pages that made it appear that they had accidentally logged out of their university account and needed to re-enter their user credentials.”

Garrett M. Graff in WIRED

This is the essence of spear-phishing.

TraitWare® can stop data theft by eliminating login credentials. Already TraitWare® has demonstrated secure access to G Suite, Slack, Office 365, WordPress, and other systems without usernames and passwords. TraitWare® can also provide additional factors and geofencing when account security requires even more protection.

In late February 2018, TraitWare® released its plugin for the WordPress dashboard login that eliminates WordPress usernames and passwords. In addition, TraitWare® has processes available to log in to enterprise applications. Spear-phishing for usernames and passwords can be a thing of the past for companies using TraitWare®.

Caliber Security Partners had the following to say about spear-phishing:

“We have seen (and executed on behalf of our clients) many phishing attacks that fooled even the IT departments. The fact is, phishing attacks are becoming more and more sophisticated every day. It is tiring to constantly examine a URL to make sure it looks legitimate, but that is where we are today with technology. Eliminating the need for login credentials is a great step forward to thwart phishing attacks. …. Reducing the need to type in log-in information and replacing that with some sort of two-factor authentication and biometric key will wind up preventing many attacks, and will save people and organizations money and stress.” Jackson Pierce, VP of Operations, Caliber Security Partners.

It is time to eradicate spear-phishing attacks by eliminating usernames and passwords. You can’t steal or hack something that doesn’t exist.

Go to traitware.com to learn more.