Hint: DMARC Alone Won't Cut It Think the prospect of cybercriminals using your domains to launch phishing attacks sounds bad for your brand? Just wait until you hear the latest on lookalike domains. Over the last few months, researchers have been discovering a troubling number of phishing sites that feature domains meant to impersonate leading brands in a variety of industries. Sometimes referred...

A growing body of evidence suggests employees throughout the healthcare sector may be uniquely vulnerable to phishing attacks. If finding itself a growing target for cybercriminals weren’t bad enough, the industry is also seeing associated lawsuits piling up. Montana-based Kalispell Regional Healthcare was recently hit with a suit after it disclosed that multiple employees had fallen victim to...

You’ve heard the statistics…more than 70% of all business users will be provisioned with cloud office applications in the next two years, including email. It’s an overdue modernization that eliminates physical infrastructure to drive cost savings and integrate services for improved productivity Chasing this move, cybercriminals intent on account takeover are evolving their tactics, targeting end...

Imagine going to the doctor and only being able to say “pain” or “sick”. You can’t say where you feel the pain, or what type of pain, or what is making you sick. Without this information, it is nearly impossible for the doctor to know how to treat you. From a cybersecurity perspective, this is very much like calling every email attack a “phishing attack" or even a “hack”. It limits the ability to...

Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on the Microsoft Security blog and has been republished here. You already know that email is the number one attack vector for cybercriminals. But what you might not know is that without a standard email security protocol called Domain Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance ( DMARC ), your organization is open to the phishing attacks that...

At Agari we often talk about the evolving nature of advanced email attacks and the identity deception tactics that go with them. These attacks bypass legacy controls and like a magician delighting a curious audience, they trick the human psyche by targeting core human emotions such as fear, anxiety and curiosity. Of course, the magic in this case comes with ill intent. A good example of a...

Receipts and invoices—two accounting powerhouses that require little introduction. But step a little further into the world of finance and accounts, and you can quickly become a fish out of water, as the terminology to this numerical land seems to multiply exponentially. That said, in some of our recent active defense engagements with BEC cybercriminals, we have observed a new way scammers are...

There is no denying that business email compromise (BEC) is big business, with losses exceeding a billion dollars in the United States in the last year alone. Globally, BEC attacks have cost more than $13 billion in the last five years. Chances are likely that you’ve probably been a recipient of one of these social-engineered emails yourself. But the question remains… who is behind these...

You likely have a fraudulent email from a business email compromise (BEC) scammer sitting in your inbox, and you may not realize it. However, recent research from the Agari Cyber Intelligence Division (ACID) has shown that these advanced phishing attacks increasingly possess a handful of commonalities, making them easier to spot—which is good news considering their popularity. There are more BEC...

One of the trends that has been slowly creeping up across the BEC threat landscape is that actors are using other techniques in order to get money outside of an organization. While a traditional BEC attack includes instructions for wiring money outside of the organization, more and more actors are asking for a large number of gift cards instead of the classical request of “Please wire $30,000 to...

Business email compromise (BEC) fraud is a lucrative venture, and now that industry is expanding in a troubling way—by lowering the barrier to entry so that anyone with a couple hundred bucks can outsource a BEC attack. BEC criminals are organized, behaving in many ways like legitimate businesses . And just like any successful company in a growing industry, these criminals are looking to add...

Mergers and acquisitions can build your company's value overnight, but business email compromise (BEC) and data breaches can tear it down just as quickly. Too often, M&A announcements are followed by waves of BEC attacks against the companies involved, or by news that the target company was the victim of a data breach. To get the most value from a merger or acquisition, you need to know how to...

According to a public service announcement issued by the FBI, college students across the United States continue to be targeted in a common email phishing scam that lures students in with the promise of employment. It works like this: email Scammers advertise phony job opportunities on college employment websites or students receive emails on their student accounts recruiting them for fictitious...

Every year, more than 5 million homes are bought and sold in the U.S. Given this volume, it should come as no surprise that the real estate industry is a prime target for email-based crimes. Cyber criminals are spoofing (and in some cases taking over) the email accounts of real estate agents, title companies, and others involved in the home buying process. Once the criminal gains access, he or she...

One of the things that often stumps even the most security conscious companies is knowing all the third-party email service providers they are working with. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible for these organizations to protect their customers from phishing attacks if they don’t even know who is sending legitimate email on their behalf. And this gets even more challenging when you...

Ask any security professional what the number one pain point is within their organization, and chances are they’ll say ‘user behavior’…with ‘malware’ coming in as a very close second. And while these issues are very different on the surface, they do have one thing in common: both are often the cause of high-profile data breaches, largely in part to the increased use of spear phishing email...

In the second in our series of blogs on the Fundamentals of Phishing we will explore how to identify fraudulent emails. Not that long ago, phishing attempts were quite primitive and often full of errors, and it was easier for consumers to identify when something was amiss. In addition, consumers weren’t accessing their inboxes from multiple devices and mobiles, nor did they expect to receive...

One of the great things about a conference like BlackHat is that it gives people like me the opportunity to take a step back, get out of the specific back alleyways of cybersecurity that we usually inhabit, and take a broader, more holistic look at attack and defense. One concept that's been talked about for a while is the Cyber Kill Chain. It takes a military-theoretical approach to network asset...