Email

Phishing remains a significant threat to organizations. A new report from Darktrace shows 17.8 million phishing emails detected across its customer fleet between December 21, 2023, and July 5, 2024. Alarmingly, 62 percent of these emails successfully bypassed DMARC checks.

Cybercriminals are embracing more sophisticated tactics, techniques and procedures designed to evade traditional security parameters.

Almost half (49 percent) of all detected spam emails are attributed to business email compromise (BEC) scams, with the CEO, followed by HR and IT, being the most common targets according to a new report.

The research from VIPRE Security Group puts a more sinister complexion on this trend, revealing that a full 40 percent of the BEC emails uncovered were AI-generated, and in some instances, AI likely created the entire message.

Of course all companies are vulnerable to email threats, but analysis by Barracuda of targeted email attacks over the past year, reveals that organizations are vulnerable in different ways, according to their size.

Lateral phishing -- where attacks are sent to mailboxes across the organization from an already compromised internal account -- makes up just under half (42 percent) of targeted email threats against organizations with 2,000 employees or more, but just two percent of attacks against companies with up to 100 employees.

New email rules from major providers mean that businesses need to adopt the DMARC standard in order to ensure that their emails get delivered.

But while the new rules have received a good deal of publicity there hasn't been much attention paid to those not running their own mail server and relying on a third-party mail services.

Email security tools such as Secure Email Gateways (SEGs) often encode URLs that are embedded in emails. This enables the security appliance to scan the URL before the recipient visits the website.

But when SEGs detect URLs in emails that have already been SEG encoded they don't scan the URL. A new report from Cofense reveals that threat actors are making use of this to avoid detection.

Mozilla has unveiled Thunderbird 128.0, around a year to the day after the last major release of its email client. Thunderbird 128.0, codenamed Nebula, isn’t just a major new release in its own right, it also heralds a new era for Thunderbird.

Going forward, Thunderbird will adopt the same monthly-release cycle as Firefox, its browser sibling. As a result, Thunderbird 128.0 comes in two major flavors: regular release, and ESR for those who prefer less frequent major updates.

Cybercriminals are abusing legitimate URL protection services to hide malicious URLs in phishing emails, according to a new Threat Spotlight from Barracuda Networks.

Researchers have observed phishing attacks taking advantage of three different URL protection services to mask their phishing URLs. The services are provided by trusted, legitimate brands. To date, these attacks have targeted hundreds of companies.

Only 61 percent of manufacturing businesses have adopted DMARC, with 19 percent of the total manufacturers analyzed having adopted the most stringent 'p=reject' DMARC policy.

New research from email security provider EasyDMARC, which surveyed almost 5,000 global manufacturing companies, finds 43 percent of those with DMARC use a low-security DMARC policy that allows suspicious emails to reach inboxes but enables reporting on such activity.

In the realm of digital communication, crafting the perfect email is both an art and a science, especially when the goal is to convert that email into a meeting or a tangible outcome. With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), the stakes have been raised, offering unprecedented opportunities for personalization, efficiency, and effectiveness in email outreach. At the heart of this revolution lies a seemingly simple yet profoundly impactful element: the prompt.

A prompt, in the context of LLMs, is more than just a starting point for generating text; it's the steering wheel that guides the AI in a specific direction, ensuring that the output aligns with the sender's intentions, tone, and objectives. The importance of prompts becomes even more pronounced when considering the goal of converting an email into a meeting -- a task that requires precision, personalization, and persuasion. Prompts provide:

Hardly a week goes by without news of another email-based attack via phishing or Business Email Compromise (BEC) scam. These types of attacks can cause a great deal of damage to infrastructure and an organization’s image, whether it is a large enterprise, a small-medium business (SMB) or even much smaller retailers. The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) reports that the average financial loss per BEC attack is $125,000 and last year estimated the Business Email fraud industry to be valued at a whopping $50 billion.

These attacks are increasingly creative, and typically involve impersonation of someone such as the head of an organization or finance. If someone responds on behalf of the executive, they could unknowingly give away the keys to the kingdom, causing significant losses. With that in mind, let’s review some of the larger email security trends.

The last six months has seen a 341 percent increase in malicious emails, including an alarming spike in phishing, BEC, and other message-based attacks fueled by the continued growth of generative AI.

The latest State of Phishing Report from SlashNext finds that since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, there has been a 4,151 percent increase in malicious emails sent.

Over the last few months, there have been numerous complaints from users of Microsoft Outlook that they are unable to reply to encrypted emails. An error message that reads "Microsoft Outlook was not able to create a message with restricted permission" is displayed.

While Microsoft has acknowledged the issue in the desktop email client, the company is yet to fix it properly. There is, however, a temporary workaround that can be used to make it possible to reply to encrypted emails.

The latest Email Threat Trends report from VIPRE Security Group identifies the US as the top source of spam emails globally, followed by the UK, Ireland, and Japan. The US, UK, and Canada are the top three countries most subjected to email-based attacks.

Looking at targets, the manufacturing, government, and IT sectors are the most attacked by malicious actors. In Q1 2024, the manufacturing sector suffered 43 percent of email-based attacks, with government (15 percent) and IT (11 percent) trailing well behind. This is a change from Q1 2023, when attackers targeted the financial (25 percent), healthcare (22 percent), and education (15 percent) sectors most often.

Since the launch of ChatGPT there has been a surge in the number of phishing emails as AI makes it easier to create convincing lures.

Email security specialist SlashNext is fighting AI with AI thanks to the launch of a new generative AI large language model (LLM) to deliver accuracy and precision in spam detection, with claimed near-zero false positive rates.

Most incidents of phishing or spoofing on smartphones still happen via email, according to MEF's (Mobile Ecosystem Forum) 9th Annual Trust Study.

The report shows 52 percent of users reporting personal experience of data harm via this channel. Surprisingly, 39 percent of those users still took no preventative measures to protect their online data.