Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Phishing attacks are a major cyber threat that continue to evolve and become more sophisticated, causing billions of dollars in losses each year according to the recent Internet Crime Report. However, traditional offline or inline phishing detection engines are limited in how they can detect evasive phishing pages. Due to the performance requirements of inline solutions, they can only target specific campaigns and, at best, act as a basic static analyzer.

Microsoft describes a sophisticated phishing campaign that targeted several financial organizations. “Microsoft Defender Experts uncovered a multi-stage adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) phishing and business email compromise (BEC) attack against banking and financial services organizations,” the researchers write. “The attack originated from a compromised trusted vendor and transitioned into a series of AiTM attacks and follow-on BEC activity spanning multiple organizations.

New data makes it crystal clear that spear phishing is a real problem… and organizations may not properly be prepared to detect and address it. Cybercriminals know the more targeted a phishing attack – from the email theming to the impersonation to the intended victim – the more likely the attack will be a success.

A business email compromise (BEC) attack involves cybercriminals making use of phishing to defraud an organization of funds. BEC is a highly devastating and costly cyberattack and has resulted in $26bn in losses since July 2016, with little to no recovery options available.

The recent discovery of a zero-day vulnerability in a well-known email security product further underscores the importance of robust email security that can effectively counter advanced email threats, offer a defense-in-depth approach, and operate in the cloud or on-premises. To start, if you believe you have suffered a breach, Trustwave’s Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) is ready and online to take your call and start helping your organization recover. Click here.

The New Verizon DBIR is a treasure trove of data. As we covered here, and here, people are one of the most common factors contributing to successful data breaches. Let’s drill down a bit more in the Social Engineering section. They explained: "Now, who has received an email or a direct message on social media from a friend or family member who desperately needs money? Probably fewer of you. This is social engineering (pretexting specifically) and it takes more skill.

We occasionally learn of articles and papers that claim that security awareness training and/or simulated phishing campaigns are not effective. We don’t want to disparage what these individuals have found in their own experience, and we encourage everyone to find out how various social engineering mitigations work for themselves and their environments.

A Chinese-speaking phishing gang has expanded its targeting from the Asia-Pacific region to the Middle East, researchers at Group-IB have found. The gang, which the researchers call “PostalFurious,” impersonated a toll operator and a postal service in the Middle East.