Analysis 101: The State of Phishing Attacks

For getting immediate access to the user privileges, attackers continue to develop more obfuscated phishing emails for targeting business users. And pandemic situations from the last 2 years accelerated these attacks as companies increasingly adopted working from home or hybrid workplaces for their employees. Varieties of campaigns were observed targeting remote users with COVID-19 templates.

Threat exposure is no more just limited to vulnerable applications, it has now extended to humans with spear phishing attacks, in which skilled hackers lure the user into clicking a link that opens a malware file in a malicious attachment. It not only risks the user but also the company’s reputation. It could also lead to possible unauthorized access to confidential information stored in the company network.

Manual efforts to complete the remediation response in non-business hours take more than the expected response time…On the other hand, Help AG is fully capable of managing these attacks with our 24×7 cybersecurity services and automated remediation through our SOAR platform.

Security controls play a vital role in blocking tons of email threats related to phishing. Security devices discard an email threat based on different patterns like no Domain-IP resolution found, no SPF records matched, blacklisted domain, file extension, malicious link, etc. This gave yet another idea to the attackers to accomplish their targets by sending spoof display names, hosting malware on reputed sites, redirecting users from clean document/site to execute/download a malicious file from another link, asking for donations to conduct financial fraud and exciting the user to share their confidential information, etc.

Many companies have started to implement the detection and elimination of bad intrusion activities within infrastructure with the help of security controls. Also conducting user awareness training related to common cyber-attacks for their employees, motivates them to report suspected activities to the security team.

Manual efforts to complete the remediation response in non-business hours take more than the expected response time for handling these attacks. In the meantime, it can impact a user or multiple users. On the other hand, Help AG is fully capable of managing these attacks with our 24×7 cybersecurity services and automated remediation through our SOAR platform. Our analysts do deep-dive investigation of the highly obfuscated emails for identifying malicious indicators of compromise (IoCs) and can feed directly to the SOAR platform for automated blocking.

Needless to say, in order to eliminate such attacks, we require support from individuals in highlighting and sharing information about suspicious emails or activities they observed in the network, to shift from supporting attack vector to developing better security posture for their company.

83% of survey respondents said their organization experienced a successful email-based phishing attack in 2021, up from 57% in 2020.

54% said their organization dealt with more than three successful attacks.

11% experienced 10 or more successful attacks.

(Source: Proofpoint State of the Phish Report 2022)