Email remains the number 1 attack vector – Mimecast
Email is still the number one attack vector when it comes to cyberattacks, according to Mimecast.
Cobus Benade and Mikey Molfessis, sales engineers at Mimecast, spoke about email threats at the 2018 MyBroadband CyberSec Conference, hosted in partnership with Vodacom.
Benade said there have been big increases in spear-phishing and ransomware attacks in recent years, along with a large jump in impersonation attack losses.
The reason for the increases is the sophisticated means attackers use to trick individuals into clicking on malicious links or entering their credentials into compromised websites.
This includes sites which are fake versions of well-known platforms – like Facebook.
Fake Facebook pages and similar attack sites can use elongated URLs and the look-and-feel of the pages they imitate, which make for convincing replicas – particularly when viewed on a mobile device, said Benade.
Alternatively, attackers can set up punycode domains which use encoding to convert Unicode characters to ASCII. This can let an attack site’s domain masquerade as a legitimate platform’s domain.
Protecting your gateways
Fortunately, there are systems which can protect users against these sites.
This includes software which secures email gateways from the attack methods used above.
End-users must also be educated to look at the URL address of a site in their browser, not just the appearance of the site, to determine whether it is legitimate.
The advice from Mimecast comes at a time when email users are targeted on a daily basis by spammers and malicious actors.
Criminals also move quickly to update their attack methods to make them as effective as possible. This was seen recently when soon after Absa launched its new branding, phishing attacks with Absa’s new logo were put into circulation.
Now read: Cyber hygiene at companies is an absolute necessity – Vodacom
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