How to stop malicious emails from turning into a catastrophe

Introduction

In a report from Barracuda Networks, the company revealed that over 1.5 million malicious and spam emails were sent from 1000’s of compromised Office 365 accounts of their clients in March 2019 alone. The increase in the number of account takeover attacks was mentioned to be the trigger for this increase in the use of security applied sciences with artificial intelligence (AI) that can protect customers from e-mail attacks. Security vendors are consistently creating new machine studying (ML) algorithms to look at giant volumes of information and to foretell if unknown file types are malicious or not.

Notorious cyber assaults like Business Email Compromise (BEC), spear phishing, credential harvesting, and watering holes use distinctive ways to accomplish their malicious objectives—but all are sorts of phishing. They try and lure users into opening emails, clicking on hyperlinks, downloading files, transferring money or data, or entering information such as account IDs and passwords into websites.

Office 365

Office 365 tenants must make the most of in-built logging and reporting performance to help monitor the protection of user accounts. For superior reporting, administrators can leverage Azure Active Directory Premium licenses to help detect suspicious and unusual activities.
There is no scarcity of malicious emails such as spam, malware, phishing, or nefarious websites on the internet many malicious actors work round the clock to infect your community, and that we as security leaders need to remain one step ahead of them. A security team must be available 24/7 three hundred and sixty-five days protecting and supporting the organizations from Office 365 Business Email Compromise Attacks and different security risks.

An enterprise email compromise, or BEC, could be a kind of advanced phishing scam that has become prevalent lately. Such attacks involve cybercriminals posing as a worker, normally a C-suite executive, so as to trick an associate of that particular person into sending payments for goods or providers right into a substitute bank account. Microsoft Office 365 remains a stunning goal for cybercriminals because it continues to be used by businesses worldwide.

The cost of cyber attacks

Cyberattacks are a billion pound plus global enterprise, and shortly will run into the trillions. The two most consequential forms of phishing scams are Business Email Compromise (BEC) and Email Account Compromise. Gone are the times of brazen scams with email topic lines like ‘Congratulations you’re a winner’. To compromise Office 365 users, as an example, criminals now use a spread of false requests and notifications, like security alerts, non-supply reports, and meeting appointments. To instigate BEC attacks, hackers will search and prey on a victims’ belief by sending a sequence of emails relating to topics that they are intrusted in.

The bad guys are getting very inventive, impersonating an executive in your organization and asking for monetary payments or they ask the staff in payroll to make modifications to bank accounts. according to the FBI, their efforts have earned them an estimated $12 billion through Business Email Compromise also called CEO fraud scams. Defending against these phishing attacks is possible by layering technical and non-technical controls. Phishing scams have just lately overtaken malware because of the main cyberattack threat and the money that can be generated from these scams.

Resident blogger for Zenosec, interested in all things cybersecurity.

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