In this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes. The latter of which malicious actors capitalize on seasonally with phishing attacks. From consumers to corporate finance and human resources (HR) departments, these social engineering attacks have become so pervasive that the IRS issued an annual advisory as a warning to businesses and consumers.
The dangers of email security are often understated. One successful email attack can lead to malware injection, system compromise, impersonation, espionage, ransomware and more. After all, phishing remains the top attack vector used by hackers. The FBI reported phishing scams were extremely prominent, with 323,972 complaints being made in the U.S. in 2021, compared to 241,342 the previous year. Adjusted losses resulting from these attacks is more than $44 million, a $10 million decrease from 2020.
Electronic mail (or email) is an integral part of how businesses function and has been a fundamental communication tool across all industries. Email communication has been used to interact instantly with employees and customers, as well as to share important information to the wider public. Emails are also effective as they can be used to connect two or more people by allowing businesses to send messages en masse to a targeted list of contacts quickly and efficiently.
In today’s environment, much of the population are doing their bank or financial transactions online and online banking or wire transfers have become a huge necessity. Recently, we received a phishing email that is targeting PayPal accounts. The email header contains an alarming subject and the From: address is a spoofed PayPal-like domain. The Message-Id is also highly suspicious as it uses web hosting site DreamHost which is not related to PayPal.
Recently, we encountered an interesting phishing webpage that caught our interest because it acts like a chameleon by changing and blending its color based on its environment. In addition, the site adapts its background page and logo depending on user input to trick its victims into giving away their email credentials. We see an email with the “initial” URLs in the example below: Figure 1. The raw phishing email showing the URLs, purporting to be a fax message that needs to be accessed.
Illustration by Derrick Deepak Roy Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. This week, we explore phishing attacks and how they’ve evolved in recent times. Way back in the 1990s, or so the story goes, users unwilling to pay for access to the internet would hunt for others’ login credentials to keep browsing for free.
Since the beginning of 2022, the unfolding geopolitical conflict between Russia and Ukraine has resulted in the discovery of new malware families and related cyberattacks. In January 2022, a new malware named WhisperGate was found corrupting disks and wiping files in Ukrainian organizations. In February 2022, another destructive malware was found in hundreds of computers in Ukraine, named HermeticWiper, along with IsaacWiper and HermeticWizard.
