Earlier this month Infotrust’s partner, Agari, released their quarterly Email Fraud and Identity Deception report. This report leverages data from their Agari Identity Graph, which has over 300 million daily model updates, insights captured from over 300 cyber security professionals and intel from over 330+ domains with DMARC implemented. In this blog post, we’ve summarised the key findings from this report, alongside the OAIC’s quarterly Data Breaches Statistics to identify the tactics cybercriminals are utilising in 2019 and the steps organisations can take to mitigate these risks.
Over 2018 we saw Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams jump by 60%, and with 96% of successful data breaches starting with an email, costing organisations globally each year $12.5 billion* and growing, this is something that cannot be ignored.
But BEC attacks aren’t the only scams organisations need to be aware of. There are a number of different ways cybercriminals can undertake an identity deception attack, as shown by the classification system below.
Cybercriminals often employ imposter sender tactics shown in the first section on the left. This tends to be attackers domain spoofing and using look-alike domains. The cybercriminal will register a domain that is very similar to the legitimate domain, using it to send email trying to trick the receiver into believing it is a legitimate email.
The other common imposter tactic is display name deception, where the ‘From’ field within the email is adapted to match a legitimate sender but the email address itself is incorrect (an example can be seen on the phone image).
According to Agari’s Email Fraud and Identity Deception report, compromised accounts were used in 20% of identity deception attacks. This is the most concerning attack vector for 2019, as the attack is coming from an authentic sender, making it extremely difficult to be identified as malicious.
With the continually expanding market on the dark web for stolen login credentials belonging to valuable targets, and the difficulty in which to detect these attacks, we suspect this percentage to grow exponentially over the next 6 months.
All of these attacks outlined so far employ identity deception in some way, evading your traditional Secure Email Gateway (SEG) solutions. Many vendors advise their customers to undertake security awareness training with their end users to try to mitigate this risk, however it takes just one employee taking an accidental misstep to have a serious incident on your hands. The Infotrust solution prevents ‘bad’ email, by first modelling ‘good’ senders. Email platforms and SEG’s look for ‘bad’ email, which is like “looking for a needle in a haystack” – our solution models good senders, thereby removing the hay from the haystack, leaving only the needles of ‘bad email’. This is revolutionary and the product is being used widely in North America and available in Australia from Infotrust. To find out more about the Agari Advanced Threat Protection solution click here.
Between October to December, the OAIC reported 272 data breach notifications from Australian businesses, 17 more than the previous quarter. Whilst it is positive to see that businesses are taking their responsibility to report breaches seriously, it is concerning to see that the number of reports is still increasing quarter on quarter.
64% of these breaches were due to malicious or criminal attacks, with 43% being the direct result of phishing and 24% due to compromised or stolen credentials.* As mentioned earlier, compromised or stolen credentials are one of the most concerning techniques being utilised due to its difficulty of being detected.
If email fraud and identity deception attacks are a concern for your business, Infotrust has the solution to help. Infotrust deploys Agari’s Advanced Threat Protection solution, which prevents ‘bad’ email, by first modeling ‘good’ senders. Email platforms and SEG’s look for ‘bad’ email, which is like “looking for a needle in a haystack” – our solution models good senders, thereby removing the hay from the haystack, leaving only the needles of ‘bad email’. This is revolutionary and the product is being used widely in North America and available in Australia from Infotrust.