Do you use email for work?

👨‍💻 Do you use email for work? Keep in mind that…

…up to 80% of phishing attacks on organizations are carried out through it.

Positive Technologies specialists conducted a study in which they presented a detailed analysis of modern methods of phishing attacks on corporate email and identified potential blind spots in its protection tools.

We have described many such email attacks (#phishing), for example:

1️⃣ Phishing with QR codes, in which the link contained malicious code hidden behind obfuscation and collecting credentials.

2️⃣ In a recent attack, we described phishing with a QR code that lured the victim to Telegram to collect information and further generate personalized payment forms.

3️⃣ In this study, users were attacked using malicious attachments representing a remote access trojan (RAT) that operates using the Solana blockchain.

4️⃣ In posts (like here, and also here) we talked about complex redirection chains with malicious payloads hosted on legitimate services.

Key insights from the study:

▶️ Sending an email is just the tip of the iceberg: the attack then develops through mobile devices, messengers, web resources, or compromise of user sessions. We have described many such attacks, for example:

▶️ Malware is the primary tool of attack via email (70%). Ransomware was used in 49% of cases.

▶️ Traditional filtering mechanisms no longer guarantee security: attackers use QR codes, HTML attachments, short-lived domains, redirection chains, and AiTM phishing.

▶️ Phishing has turned into a service industry (PhaaS), where ready-made chains of malicious solutions are sold.

▶️ The advanced phishing toolkit must be countered by a multi-layered email protection system.

Learn more — on the website 💌

@ptescalator (X, Max)