The PhishLabs Blog

It’s time to take action against phish! Phishing attacks are no longer few and far between, they are the norm.

Regardless of your company’s investments in filtering technologies and countermeasures, suspicious and malicious emails make it into employee inboxes. It only takes one to cost your company time, money, and lost reputation.

We’ve previously reported on how, due to the rise in phishing attempts leveraging SSL certificates, the  icon in your web browser gives your users a false sense of security. The threat, however, doesn’t end with your web browser.

You are affected by social engineering tactics every day.

Phishing attacks are supposed to be visible. If you can’t see them, how could anyone possibly fall for them? Since the dawning of time for phishing attacks there has been a constant struggle between the threat actors creating phishing sites and the individuals and organizations combating them.

Healthcare data breaches are among the most costly of any industry, and phishing attacks are the number one cause. 

Security technologies, while essential, are not enough to mitigate the threat posed by phishing. Over 90 percent of data breaches contain a phishing component, and the average cost to remediate a data breach is $3.86 million.

We've recently noticed two significant changes in C2 tactics used by the threat actors behind BankBot Anubis, a mobile banking trojan. First is the use of Chinese characters to encode the C2 strings (in addition to base64 encoding). The second is the use of Telegram Messenger in addition to Twitter for communicating C2 URLs. 

This month the largest recorded data dump in history, 87GB filled with passwords and user credentials, was made available. Dubbed Collection #1 consists of 1,160,253,228 unique combinations of email addresses and passwords. Though historic, there are two positive notes regarding this information: The first is that this data set was circulated on hacking forums back in December of 2018 and is considered a few years old, and the second being that none of this data is the result of a new breach. In short, this is a very large collection of already breached data from at least 340 different websites.

It happens on a daily basis, it’s even likely that at some point it happened to you: social media account takeovers. A quick Google search shows a new batch of celebrities, politicians, companies, and other high profile users becoming the victim of account takeovers on a weekly basis.

Since 2015 there has been a steady increase in threat actors’ use of SSL certificates to add an air of legitimacy to malicious websites. By the end of 2017 almost a third of phishing sites had SSL certificates, meaning their URLs began with HTTPS:// and (most) browsers displayed the all-important padlock symbol.

Phishing simulations come with a range of emotions for the users who interact with them. Some will simply ignore them, others may fail by clicking on a link or attachment, and for the well-trained, they may even report them.

Even if there is a negative outcome, training leads and organizations should not be worried, yet. Just like in school, these simulations are just that, simulations or quizzes. They are designed to prepare users for the real test or a potential attack or phishing lure from a threat actor.