DAB Global - Blog
Email or Cyberattack?
So you may see an email bearing the name of your favorite Retailer, Restaurant or Boutique, maybe a discount coupon from the luxury stores. A message for an educational course or email from your child’s school and it bears a name that you know. So far, nothing that triggers an alert like a typical Nigerian Scam or Lottery Phishing email.
You unsuspectingly click on it. And Boom!
This is one popular example of an email cyberattack using email as an attack vector to steal user credentials and/or other sensitive data. These can now be leveraged for malicious intent. Despite the growth in more targeted attacks through other vectors, email is still the most common channel for opportunistic and targeted attacks and a significant source of data loss.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Email cyberattacks are on the rise. This is evident by the tripling and quadrupling of the quantity of emails being filtered into your junk mail box. Unfortunately, legitimate emails also get filtered into the Junk folder, so its easy for the average user to be think that some emails are legitimate.
Why is it so easy?
Well, as with all types of crime, the criminals evolve and come up with newer and more cutting-edge ways of committing their crimes. So, whilst there are a lot of controls which would have been developed for businesses to put in place, if these control systems haven’t been upgraded with time, this creates a risk to the business. Previous controls would have detected fake email addresses or email addresses that are blacklisted and they
block them, but legitimate ones often slip through the cracks.
Hackers tend to look for companies who have weak or no security on their digital platforms to infiltrate, take their legitimate email addresses or create fake email addresses from their legitimate email server and they use that as a vehicle to now target unsuspecting users and entities. As little as 1% of victims clicking on the malware is all that is needed to start it spreading.
Using Legitimate Email Addresses
Hackers target legitimate organizations – big and small, individual e-commerce set ups and long-standing brick-and-mortar businesses who have just pivoted into the digital age. Some cyberattack use email addresses to target persons who are on legitimate distribution lists or from whom they have captured email addresses.
Defenses UP!
So, to all the hard-working E-Commerce folks out there who are busy building your Email databases and customer social media contacts – the risk is real! Weak or absent cybersecurity program places this critical and valuable asset at risk in many ways: (1) It can corrupt your contact database (2) weaponize your contacts database to churn out emails with malware that further transmits the dangerous malware (3) steal sensitive, credit card and other payment data that can compromise your customers’ financial information.
The ultimate result being not only damage to reputation but severe business interruption, ripple effects include financial impact due to loss of revenue through sales, costs to recover data from affected systems and implementation of the necessary security controls.
There are many types of Email cyber attacks including Spam, Email Phishing and whaling, Spoofing and many more.
DAB Global Technologies can provide the Email security that you need.
Contact us to assess your systems and offer you backup and recovery services to protect your email, data and prevent no data loss. Implement proactive security to stop cyberthreats across your network and minimize your vulnerabilities
About Us
DAB is a global leader in cybersecurity services and technologies.