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Posts Tagged ‘phishing’

SPF and DKIM: The State of Domain-based Email Authentication – Part 1

Friday, September 1st, 2017

Recent reports on cyber-security threats in the healthcare sector by Verizon, Symantec and Ponemon consistently make several observations:

  • Email-borne malware is on the rise, with such malware delivered via spam or phishing;
  • Small-to-medium sized businesses (from all sectors) have the highest rate of email-delivered malware;
  • Most breaches are caused by negligent employees or contractors.

These conclusions are hardly surprising as email is now an increasingly common part of communications with protected health information (PHI) frequently exchanged amongst employees and patients within a practice, between medical providers, and medical providers and their business associates. The concern for the healthcare industry is the potential violation of the HIPAA privacy rule caused by email-related (and other) breaches, leading to disruptions from loss of data, compliance audits and possibly hefty fines.

No Phishing

We wrote about obvious measures medical providers can take to avoid HIPAA non-compliance in email exchanges such as opt-out email security. That addresses only one aspect of the threat landscape, though – the protection of PHI in email exchanges. Another aspect is more sinister, as it deals with external, malignant actors. These actors use various spoofing techniques to trick patients or employees of a medical practice to react incautiously, often impulsively, to emails supposedly coming from valid sources. These often lead to identity theft, where the damage is more far-reaching as the information given up is more long-lived and more widely used and cannot just be erased like revoking a misused credit card.

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Tags: DMARC, identity theft, phishing, sender, skim, spf
Posted in LuxSci Library: The Technical Side of Email
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Phishing or for Real? Why Companies Need to Take a Closer Look at Their Email Marketing

Friday, April 7th, 2017

 

In July 2016, Hilton HHonors loyalty program members received an email asking them to log into their Hilton HHonors account to confirm their correct email address, mailing address, and other personal details.

The email set off alarm bells for a number of customers. One tweeted a screenshot of the email to the Hilton HHonors Twitter account, asking, “… is this legit? Looks very much like a phishing email…”Phishing

Hilton’s support team responded, “This is not an email from the HHonors team. Please do not share your account details.”

The only problem? It was a legitimate email from Hilton HHonors, but it so closely resembled a phishing email it fooled Hilton’s own IT team.

Hilton is not the only company to inadvertently send customer emails that are nearly indistinguishable from phishing emails. Many companies send emails asking their customers to log in to confirm account information or confirm payment details. Sometimes, cautious customers will reach out to the digital community for feedback on whether an email is real or fake.

These emails are a problem because not only do customers believe them to be phishing emails, but they normalize emails that ask for personal information—making people more vulnerable to real phishing scams in the future.

Marketers need to understand email marketing best practices to send secure customer messages that don’t endanger customer privacy and data. Here’s everything you need to know from a technical and content perspective to make sure your email isn’t mistaken for a phishing scam.

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Tags: Hilton, marketing, phishing
Posted in Email Marketing
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Analyzing a Forged Email Message: How to Tell It Was Forged?

Monday, February 9th, 2015

In our previous posting, we looked at exactly how Spammers and hackers can send forged email — how its is possible and how it is done.  Therein, we gave an example how one could send an email forged to be from Bank of America.

In this post, we will look at that forged Bank of America email to see technically what it looks like and how it differs from legitimate email from Bank of America.

What can we learn that allows us to detect forged email in the future?

The Forgery: Received.

The forged email from Bank of America was based on a legitimate email message, so that the forgery could look as close as possible to actual email from them.

In truth, the majority of forged email simply changes the “From” address and does not bother with anything else.  These forged messages are used for Spam and hope the forgery fools enough people to be worth it, through numbers.  What we are looking at here is a more carefully crafted message designed to fool filters and a careful eye.  These kinds of fakes might be used in spear phishing attacks on an individual or in more sophisticated Spam campaigns.

The the forged Bank of America email that arrived in the recipient’s mail box looked like this (the raw headers):

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Tags: forged email, hacker, headers, ip address, phishing
Posted in LuxSci Library: The Technical Side of Email
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How can Spammers and Hackers Send Forged Email?

Thursday, February 5th, 2015

Everyone has seen spam messages arrive with a “From” address that is your own address, a colleague’s, a friends, or that of some company that you work with or use.  These From addresses are forged to help the messages (a) get by your spam filters, and (b) get by your “eyeball filters”.

But how are these folks “allowed” to do that?

When email was first developed, there was no concept of the need for security; protections against identity theft and forgery were not part of the plan.  As a result, it is actually trivial for one to send an email with a forged “From” address and even some forged “Received” tracking lines by just connecting to your target’s email server and telling it whatever you want.

Let’s try to send an email to the address “testuser@luxsci.net” pretending to be from “Bank of America”.  The purpose of this exercise is not to teach you how to send forged email so much (this is not a new technique) as to set the stage for understanding how to detect and combat these kinds of messages.

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Tags: Bank of America, filters, forged email, phishing, smtp, spe, telnet
Posted in LuxSci Library: The Technical Side of Email
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8 Ways to Protect yourself from Forged/Fake Email

Monday, January 26th, 2015

The Internet is rife with fake and forged email.  Typically these are email messages that appear to be from a friend, relative, business acquaintance, or vendor that ask you to do something.  If you trust that the message is really from this person, you are much more likely to take whatever action is requested — often to your detriment.

These are forms of social engineering — the “bad guys” trying to establish a trusted context so that you will give them information or perform actions that you otherwise would not or should not do.

Here we address some of the actions you can take to protect yourself from these attacks as best as possible.  We’ll present these in the order of increasing complexity / technical difficulty.

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Tags: dkim, dns, email, fake, filtering, forged, html, phishing, read, social engineering, spam, spf
Posted in LuxSci Library: Security and Privacy, LuxSci Library: The Technical Side of Email
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