The true cost of a successful phishing campaign may be higher than you think. Although phishing defenses and user education have become common in many organizations, employees still fall prey to these attacks. This is a problem because phishing is often leveraged as the first step in other cyberattack methods. As a result, its economic impact remains hidden. Understanding how these attacks work is key to mitigating your risk.
One reason phishing is so insidious is that attackers continuously evolve their methods. In this blog, I’ve described why you need to take phishing seriously and how different phishing methods work. You’ll also find links to Microsoft Threat Protection solutions that can help you reduce your risk.
According to Accenture’s Ninth Annual Cost of Cybercrime Study, phishing attacks cost the average organization USD1.4 million in 2018, an eight percent rise over 2017. This likely underestimates the cost because the report only considers four major consequences when determining the cost of an attack: business disruption, information loss, revenue loss, and equipment damage. However, phishing is used as the delivery method for several other attacks, including business email compromise, malware, ransomware, and botnet attacks. The 2019 Verizon Data Breach Report finds that almost one in three attacks involved phishing. And according to the 2019 Internet Crime Complaint Center, phishing/vishing/smishing/pharming are the most common methods for scamming individuals online.
Since the costs of other attacks can often be attributed to phishing, a comprehensive cyber risk mitigation strategy should place a high value on phishing defenses and user education.
As attackers have developed new methods to evade detection by defenders and victims, phishing has transformed. Phishing now uses mediums other than email, including voicemail, instant messaging, and collaboration platforms, as people have enhanced email-based defenses, but may have not considered these other attack vectors. The success of phishing as the delivery of other cyberattacks makes it critically important for defenders to be able to identify the many types of phishing and how to defend against them, including:
Fahmida Y. Rashid provides more details about these type of phishing attacks on CSO.
Recently, another phishing type was identified called consent phishing. In response to COVID-19, people have increased their usage of cloud apps and mobile devices to facilitate work from home. Bad actors have taken advantage of this shift by leveraging application-based attacks to gain unwarranted access to valuable data in cloud services. By using application prompts similar to that on mobile devices, they trick victims into allowing the malicious applications permission to access services and data (see Figure 2).
Figure 1: Familiar application prompts trick users into giving malicious apps access to services and data.
The following best practices can help you defend against this new threat:
Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (Office 365 ATP), natively protects all of Office 365 against advanced attacks. The service leverages industry-leading intelligence fueled by trillions of signals to continuously evolve to prevent emerging threats, like phishing and impersonation attacks. As part of Microsoft Threat Protection, Office 365 ATP provides security teams with the tools to investigate and remediate these threats, and integrates with other Microsoft Threat Protection products like Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection and Azure Advanced Threat Protection to help stop cross-domain attacks spanning email, collaboration tools, endpoints, identities, and cloud apps.
Microsoft Threat Protection stops attacks across Microsoft 365 services and auto-heals affected assets. It leverages the Microsoft 365 security portfolio to automatically analyze threat data across identities, endpoints, cloud applications, and email and docs. By fusing related alerts into incidents, defenders can respond to threats and attacks immediately and in their entirety, saving precious time. (see Figure 3).
The following actions will help you gain greater visibility into attacks to protect your organization.
Figure 2: Microsoft Threat Protection and Office 365 ATP provide several capabilities to help you protect your organization from phishing attacks.
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Business email operators seek to exploit the daily sea of email traffic to lure victims into providing financial and other sensitive business information.
