How to Detect and Respond to a Phishing Attack

A phishing email reaches your staff every working day. One click hands an attacker a password, a session token, or a foothold on your network. In 2025 Canadians reported over 704 million dollars in fraud losses to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, and spear phishing sat among the top three schemes by financial impact. The threat is not going away. Your defence rests on two skills: spotting the attack early and responding fast once someone takes the bait.

Detection and response work together. Detection stops most attempts before harm spreads. Response limits the damage when one slips through. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security ranks phishing as a top delivery method for ransomware and credential theft in its National Cyber Threat Assessment 2025 to 2026. You need both halves of the plan, and you need every employee to play a part.

How a phishing attack unfolds

The Cyber Centre breaks a phishing attack into three stages: the bait, the hook, and the attack. First, a threat actor sends a message dressed up as a bank, a courier, or a coworker. Next, the target believes the message and clicks a link or opens an attachment. Then the attacker uses stolen credentials or planted malware to reach accounts, email, and internal systems. Each stage gives your team a chance to break the chain. The CCCS guidance on spotting malicious email messages lays out the signals to watch at every step.

What to look for

Phishing plays on urgency, fear, and trust. Train your eyes on a short set of signals. A sender demands action before a deadline. A message asks for a password, a payment, or personal details. A link points to a login page you did not expect. An offer looks too good to be real. The address sits close to a name you know but carries an extra word or a swapped letter. Attackers now write clean, fluent messages with AI, so poor spelling no longer serves as your only clue. Judge the request, not the grammar.

Report first, delete later

Teach your staff one rule above all others: report a suspicious message before deleting it. A deleted email hides the evidence your responders need. Set up a simple report button or a shared inbox for suspected phishing. Ask employees to verify any odd request through a second channel, such as a phone call to a known number. The Cyber Centre stresses this step in its phishing guidance. One quick report from an alert employee often stops an attack before it reaches a second victim.

Respond fast when someone clicks

Speed decides the outcome. When an employee enters credentials on a fake page, reset the password at once and revoke active sessions. Turn on multi-factor authentication so a stolen password alone fails to grant access. Isolate any device from the network if the user opened an attachment. Check email rules for hidden forwarding an attacker added to read future messages. Look for signs of lateral movement toward other accounts. The CCCS phishing guidance tells organizations to fold these exact steps into an incident response plan, not to improvise them under pressure.

Build the plan before the attack

A response works only when you write it down first. Document who to call, how to reset accounts, and when to notify leadership or clients. Under Canadian privacy law, a breach of security safeguards with a real risk of significant harm triggers a duty to report to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and to notify affected people. Decide your reporting path now. Run a tabletop exercise so your team rehearses the steps once a quarter. Pair the plan with the CCCS Baseline Cyber Security Controls, which list backups, patching, and MFA as core defences against phishing-borne malware.

Where training turns awareness into skill

Tools flag threats. People decide what to do next. The gap between an alert and a correct action closes with role-based training. Front-line staff need to recognize the bait, so the Certified Security Awareness 1 course grounds every employee in daily habits. Analysts who watch logs and triage alerts sharpen their eye with the Certified Cybersecurity Analyst track. When a click turns into a live incident, the Certified Incident Handling Engineer program walks responders through containment and recovery. Leaders who set policy and fund these controls benefit from the Certified Information Systems Security Officer path.

Your next step

Pick one weak spot and fix it this week. Add a report button to your email client. Turn on MFA for every account. Write the first draft of a phishing response checklist. Then train the people who run it. Detection and response are skills, not products, and a skilled team cuts the odds of a costly breach. Start with your staff, give them a clear path, and phishing loses most of its edge against you.