Gain protection against advanced email attacks like BEC, ATO, social engineering, and more
Turn hours-a-day to minutes-a-month combatting phishing with customizable security automation
Triple your org's email security awareness with real-world phishing simulation testing and training
Get Adaptive AI email security against advanced attacks missed by other security controls
Eliminate the risk of ATO with advanced prevention, detection, and response
Protect your organization from image-based attacks like malicious QR codes
Put SecOps workloads on auto-pilot with automated email remediation and more
Send your employees customized simulations built from real-world threats
Build a security-centric culture with automated personalized awareness campaigns
Leverage insights from 20,000+ security analysts in our community for email remediation
Protect your collaboration tools including Microsoft Teams® from advanced threats
Learn how we level up our AI with advanced ML models and Human Insights
See how we uniquely enhance our adaptive AI with real-time Human Insights
Discover how we use Gen-AI, large language models, and techniques for email security
Maximize your existing security tools with our seamlessly integrated platform
Stop advanced attacks like BEC, VEC, and VIP impersonation
Continuously protect against malicious links and attachments
Block attackers from stealing your sensitive business data
Prevent, detect, and respond to ATO attacks in real time
Decipher image-based attacks from weaponized QR codes
Safeguard your organization against GPT-crafted attacks
Test your employees with real-world email attacks
Build a security-first organization with integrated SAT campaigns
As the email phishing threat landscape continues to rapidly evolve, understanding the totality of the email security and anti-phishing universe can be difficult for even the savviest of enterprise buyers. That’s because for many years, organizations believed that they could adequately reduce cyber risk by simply deploying Secure mail gateway (SEG) technology along with anti-spam filters and basic employee security awareness training.
Up until 2014 or so, this sentiment was more accurate than not. But then the landscape started to change. Phishing transformed into spear-phishing, followed closely by the introduction of malware and ransomware into the mainstream. The emergence of social engineering, including Business Email Compromise (BEC), added additional complexity, now overburdening both human and gateway controls.
In response to the rising threats, email security solutions and antiphishing tools began to evolve. Legacy signature-based tools built on YARA rules began to have their value propositions challenged by smart, self-learning technology built on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and automated incident response. This new generation of email security technology promised to accelerate the time from incident discovery to organization-wide remediation.
This convergence of more frequent and sophisticated phishing threats with more advanced cybersecurity solutions and services significantly increased the complexity of the anti-phishing ecosystem, making it increasingly difficult for security specialists to quantify and qualify email risks and emerging solutions versus legacy controls.
In an attempt to declutter the ambiguity around domain vernacular and to bring clarity to the buying process, we’ve developed this whitepaper to help readers better understand and make sense of the tactics, techniques, standards, protocols, technology and solutions that comprise the email phishing threat landscape. To begin, here are the ten most common phishing tactics:
Account takeover
Most commonly deployed by financially motivated attackers, account takeover occurs when an adversary obtains - either through legal or illegal actions - a person’s legitimate login credentials to a website, server or application, enabling them to commit various types of financial fraud.
Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)
An APT refers to a sophisticated hacker, cybercrime outfit or nation state exploiting multiple threat vectors, including email, for both reconnaissance and exploitation purposes. The method is commonly used as a means to gain unauthorized access to networks, servers or devices.
Credential Harvesting
A highly common phishing tactic where attackers will attempt to lure a recipient into entering their password or other compromising log-in information, usually via a web page. This is most often deployed via spear phishing.
Let’s switch gears a bit and explain the difference between an email phishing tactic and an email phishing technique as we see it. In truth, tactics and techniques are often talked about interchangeably, as the distinction between them is small and rather unimportant most of the time. But for the purposes of this analysis, we consider techniques as extensions or variations of a tactic.
For example, business email compromise (which we will talk more about later in this article) is ultimately a spear-phishing technique. BEC attacks fit within the definition of spear-phishing, but have distinctive elements, such as the absence of a malicious payload, that make it unalike from what is commonly recognized as a traditional spear-phishing attack.
While the number of phishing tactics can be counted on both hands, the number of phishing techniques is quite vast, and growing on a regular basis. That’s because attackers are always seeking out new methods to defeat both human and technical anti-phishing controls. This game of cat and mouse has been ongoing for nearly two decades, and adversaries’ relative success in bypassing email security protocols suggests that the evolution of phishing techniques is here to stay.
If we revisit this whitepaper 12-18 months from now, it’s likely that we would be able to add another 2-3 trending techniques to the list, if not more. The reality is that phishing remains the number one driver of cyberattacks and so, as defenses ramp up, cybercriminals are already scheming their next moves. Email authentication isn’t only about protecting the integrity of messaging. Rather, it is about how brands can ensure deliverability with bulk email distribution. But as phishing and spam have evolved from an occasional annoyance to a never-ending threat, email authentication has emerged as a popular means of reducing the risk of malicious messages. There is a common misunderstanding though as to how much of a role authentication protocols and standards play in email security. While some vendors and email clients will have you believe that compliance will significantly reduce risk, the truth is that these safeguards represent just a small piece of the ever-growing anti-phishing puzzle.
It’s important to know that each standard and protocol was designed to solve one very specific problem. As such, these technical defenses often struggle against mitigating complex phishing attacks, especially those not spoofing domains. Further, many are difficult to implement and require intensive and costly maintenance over time.
Nonetheless, email authentication standards and protocols can be helpful as a part of a robust email security strategy. Here’s a list that every security analyst and IT professional be aware of:
At a high level, the Domain Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) protocol is a way to determine email authenticity and empowers senders to determine the fate of an email should the email fail SPF and/or DKIM verification. As such, DMARC helps reduce risk associated with only one very specific type of spoofing: domain spoofing.
While DMARC has been around for over a decade, it boomed in popularity in recent years thanks to vendor promotions and public sector adoption. While overall usage is trending upwards, only about 20% of the Fortune 500 have implemented this protocol.
In 2018, the Department of Homeland Security threw DMARC into the mainstream when it mandated that the entire agency become compliant. This direction, while well-intended, inadvertently gave off the perception that DMARC solved more email security challenges than it actually does.
In response to the mandate, we wrote an op-ed in NextGov about how DMARC was not the email security silver bullet that so many were making it out to be. Here’s an excerpt from our article, Attention Federal Agencies: DMARC is Not a Silver Bullet for Email Security:
DMARC was first launched in 2012 to better detect and prevent email spoofing. It is built on the DomainKeys Identified Mail and Sender Policy Framework and offers linkage to the sender’s domain name, reporting, and policies on how to handle authentication failures. When implemented by both sender and receiver, DMARC can help foil domain spoofing and enables organizations to filter out and reduce the number of fraudulent emails.
For DMARC to work as intended, both the sender and the receiver need to implement it correctly. But even if they have, exact domain spoofing attacks can exploit vulnerabilities in email clients to mislead end users on the validity of a message. In a direct spoofing attack, an adversary can exploit a vulnerability in a web browser or in a code to change the return path details. Mailsploit, one of the latest and most dangerous phishing techniques, can easily render DMARC obsolete by exploiting how mail servers handle text data differently than operating systems. In other words, government agencies could remain at risk of exact domain spoofing whether or not they have implemented DMARC appropriately.
Even when it is effective, DMARC can be cumbersome. It often leaves some organizations accidentally rejecting legitimate messages, and it can also break a company’s mail flow by creating a backlog of messages. DMARC is also very complicated to configure with many cloud-based solutions and can require significant maintenance beyond authorization.
DMARC, like the other email authentication protocols and standards, is only effective for solving one particular challenge. But therein lies the problem: such technical controls are only meant to solve specific problems. We have reached the point where security teams and IT leaders are spending far too much time analyzing and responding to phishing threats, and part of that is due to an over-reliance on point solutions (which is essentially what email standards and protocols are).
So now that we better understand the robust and ever-shifting email security threat landscape, one question remains: how can you protect your organization?
The lifeblood of the solutions described above is the advanced technology that powers the software and keeps organizations secure. While almost every company will claim to use “advanced technologies”, it is important to understand the basic mechanics of what these technologies entail to discern when companies are full of hot air.
For example, SEGs may claim to use AI and machine learning, but without emerging technologies to automatically understand both the content and intent (“what”) of suspicious messages, and at the same time validating sender identity and domain authenticity (“who”), they’re unable to stop the rise of social engineering threats.
Now that you’ve had time to read, absorb and better understand the email security landscape, you’re probably wondering how and where IRONSCALES fits in. Schedule a free demo today to learn how we use a combination of email security solutions and advanced technology to protect organizations around the world from phishing threats.
To learn more about how to get started please request a demo today at https://ironscales.com/get-a-demo/
"The Buck Stops Here. Best Email Security Solution On The Market"
Product Manager & Cyber Security Leader
IT Security & Risk Management Company
IRONSCALES is an innovative platform that provides complete protection against advanced phishing attacks for enterprise organizations. It combines the power of artificial intelligence with human insights to effectively detect and stop attacks such as business email compromise (BEC), account takeover (ATO), and VIP impersonation. The platform also incorporates crowdsourced threat intelligence data to continuously improve its accuracy and effectiveness in detecting phishing attempts.
One of the key advantages of IRONSCALES is its ease of use. Integration is quick and simple, taking only minutes to set up, and ongoing management does not require any specialized security expertise. This makes it accessible to organizations of all sizes and levels of technical sophistication. Additionally, IRONSCALES adapts to emerging collaboration and messaging-based threats, making it a comprehensive solution for addressing the entire spectrum of phishing problems.
In summary, IRONSCALES offers a powerful and effective solution for protecting enterprise organizations from advanced phishing attacks. Its combination of AI and human insights, coupled with its integration of crowdsourced threat intelligence data, makes it one of the most accurate and reliable platforms on the market. Its ease of use and adaptability to emerging threats make it the ideal solution for organizations looking to protect themselves from phishing attacks.
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