Security Filters Only Catch Half of Spear Phishing Emails

Feel safe because you bought a great email security filter? You might want to rethink your security strategy.

New data by researchers at IronScales suggests that 47% of payloadless phishing emails are able to bypass the most popular secure email gateways (SEGs). These are traditional text or social engineering emails that don’t contain malicious links or attachments, but instead try to manipulate the user in a more targeted manner.

“The overwhelming majority of email phishing attacks are now driven by social engineering messages aimed at prompting an action, and distributed via advanced phishing techniques such as business email compromise (BEC), VIP/CEO impersonation and other forms of email spoofing and fraud,” the researchers write. “From an attacker’s perspective, the transition from spear-phishing emails packed with malicious payloads to social engineering was a no brainer.”

The study highlights why spear phishing is so effective, mainly because because the most popular secure email gateways “were not built to analyze the language within an email and decipher a message’s context and intent.”

“The phishing attack technique with the greatest penetration rate was sender name impersonations, which occur when an email masquerades as coming from a trusted source, such as a colleague, friend or family member,” IronScales says. “Sender name impersonations accounted for 30% of all SEG penetrations, which represents a 6% increase from our 2019 analysis. Domain name impersonations, which occurs when an email is from a similar domain, in which attackers register the domain to set the right authentication records in the DNS, accounted for 25% of penetrations. This represents a 23% increase from our 2019 research. VIP impersonations, such as CEO spoofs, and fake login pages came in at 22% and 16%, respectively.”

While a strong email defense system is still beneficial it can’t be your only tool to combat cyber threats. As technology continues to improve, attackers have changed their tactics to more targeted social engineering attacks that won’t be red-flagged by firewalls. Implementing employee security awareness training can address this problem by enabling your employees to recognize social engineering attacks that reach their inboxes.

If you need assistance with your business cybersecurity needs contact DarkHound at [email protected].

Source: IronScales

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