How cyber criminals use email to attack businesses

Email account takeover and lateral phishing represent a growing threat to enterprise UK businesses. In this blog we look at recent findings into Spear Phishing and how it can be used to take over business email systems and access critical data.

How do cyber criminals exploit businesses?

Attackers follow four primary strategies to choose target recipients of lateral phishing attacks. In about one-third of email account takeover attacks, cybercriminals use additional deceptive behaviour to make their lateral phishing emails stealthier or more convincing.

A recent report from Barracuda takes an in-depth look at how compromised email accounts are being used to launch targeted lateral phishing attacks that are designed to evade many existing email protection systems, and which advanced detection techniques, security awareness training, and other strategies and solutions businesses are using to prevent attacks.

A closer look at evolving threats

Barracuda’s research uncovered fresh insights into how these popular attacks are evolving and the tactics used by cybercriminals to try to make them successful. The main findings are as follows:

  • 1 in 7 businesses experienced lateral phishing attacks in a seven-month period, based on a random sample of enterprise organisations.
  • More than 60 percent of organisations that were attacked experienced multiple incidents.
  • About 11 percent of attacks managed to successfully compromise additional employee accounts.
  • 42 percent of the lateral phishing incidents weren’t reported to the organisation’s IT or security team.
  • More than 55 percent of the lateral phishing attacks targeted recipients with some personal or work relationship to the hijacked email account.
  • 37 percent of lateral phishing attacks used tailored content that was enterprise-oriented or highly specific to the victim’s organisation.

“Email threats, including account takeover and lateral phishing, continue to evolve, and cybercriminals continue to find new ways to execute attacks, avoid detection, and trick users,” said Mike Flouton, vice president of email security at Barracuda. “Staying ahead of these types of attacks requires an understanding of the latest tactics being used by cybercriminals and the critical precautions available to help defend your business.”

Find out more

Barracuda’s latest report, titled Spear Phishing: Top Threats and Trends Vol. 2 – Email Account Takeover: Defending Against Lateral Phishing, reveals new details about these growing and evolving threats, including the latest tactics used by cybercriminals and the critical precautions to help defend your business.

The report shows you:

  • How compromised email accounts are being used to launch targeted lateral-phishing attacks that are designed to evade many existing email protection systems and fool internal and external recipients
  • Why attacks are becoming more sophisticated, stealthy and successful and how to stop them as they become harder to detect
  • Which advanced detection techniques, security awareness training and other strategies and solutions businesses are using to prevent attacks

Secure your business

While we’ve all seen the headlines of data breaches such as British Airlines and Marriott, don’t be lulled into thinking that small and medium sized business aren’t also at risk.

Email is the leading source of modern cyber-threats which makes selecting the right enterprise email security is critical to your business success – this is vital even if you’re using Microsoft Office 365 as we discuss here.

Don’t miss what Forrester Research is saying about enterprise email security – Barracuda has been named a leader in the recent Forrester Wave Enterprise Email Security report.

 

 

Request your copy of the complimentary report now to read more!

What do eBay, Uber, LinkedIn and Superdrug all have in common? 🔒 🚩

Spoiler warning – they have all experienced cyber attacks in recent years.

British Airways and Marriott International are the latest organisations to have made unwanted headlines this week with a total of almost £300 million in fines handed out to the pair by the ICO.

It prompted us to think back to some of the other big security breaches that have occurred in recent years, and to again question how prepared the majority of businesses really are for cyber attacks.

This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list, but it’s some of the big names that either affected UK firms or UK consumers (or both).

Superdrug
20,000 customer details breached, and hackers attempted to blackmail the pharmacy chain.

Equifax
Personal data from 145 million people stolen from the credit reference company.

Yahoo 
Every single one of Yahoo’s 3 billion accounts worldwide was hacked in 2013 (and details emerged in 2017).

WannaCry
The famous global ransomware attack affected more than 150 countries and 300,000 devices, targeting companies running outdated Windows software.

Uber

In 2016 hackers stole the data of 57 million Uber customers, and the company paid them $100,000 to cover it up. The breach wasn’t made public until the following year.

LinkedIn
Over 160 million accounts were compromised, and the leak was found to have been occurring for 4 years up to 2016.

eBay
145 million members’ personal details stolen in 2014. eBay’s response caused almost as much concern as the hack itself.

You can read more of the hacks in this excellent article from the BCS.

Secure your business

While these are all household names and therefore make the headlines, don’t be lulled into thinking that small and medium sized business aren’t also at risk.

Email is the leading source of modern cyber-threats which makes selecting the right enterprise email security is critical to your business success – this is vital even if you’re using Microsoft Office 365 as we discuss here.

Don’t miss what Forrester Research is saying about enterprise email security – Barracuda has been named a leader in the recent Forrester Wave Enterprise Email Security report.

 

 

Request your copy of the complimentary report now to read more!

How can I find out more?

As Barracuda Partners, Complete IT Systems can offer you expert advice on the solutions and how they could be effectively deployed in your business.

To find out more please call us on 01274 396 213 or use our contact form and we’ll arrange a good time to call you back.

5 reasons you need Barracuda if you’re running Microsoft Office 365

Using Office 365 for your business productivity tools certainly has many advantages; easy, user-friendly accessibility from anywhere and at anytime, simplified email access, and reduced costs of business operations and management.

However, the migration and use of Office 365 isn’t without security risks. In this article we look at 5 of those risks, and how your organisation can get best in class protection from ourselves and Barracuda solutions.

1) Defend your Office 365 environment against email-borne threats

Barracuda Essentials for Office 365 stops spam, viruses, and known malware using signature-matching that leverages Barracuda’s vast global threat intelligence system, which gathers real-time threat data from millions of collection points around the world. It also includes a subscription to Barracuda Advanced Threat Protection—a cloud-based service that uses a multilayered architecture with a CPU-emulation sandbox to detect and block new (zero-day) and advanced, evasive threats before they touch your deployment.

2) Prevent data loss and theft

Outbound email filtering protects sensitive data against accidental or deliberate leaking. You can define keywords to look for, along with specific types of data (social-security and credit-card numbers, for example). And if your users have inadvertently allowed their systems to be used for botnet spam, Essentials ensures that outgoing spam and viruses are blocked.

Sensitive emails can be manually marked for encryption, or you can set up rules to automatically encrypt emails based on the sender, content, and other criteria. Your Office 365 emails are sent to the Barracuda Message Center for 256-bit encryption in the cloud. They remain encrypted via Transport Layer Security (TLS) until they reach the intended recipients.

3) Discover latent threats in your mailboxes

The email files stored in your Office 365 environment almost certainly include latent threats—malicious URLs and attachments that are just waiting for a single distracted click to launch an attack on your network. Given the volume and variety of threat-bearing emails, it’s not realistic to consider a manual approach to finding and deleting them all.

The Barracuda Email Threat Scanner is a cloud-based service available to anyone, at no charge. It scans your Office 365 email folders using advanced analytic techniques. It then delivers a report that details all the latent threats, including risk levels, affected users, and more. The information not only lets you clear out the latent threats in your environment; it also gives you the insights you need to adjust or improve your email security policies and strategies to reduce the chance of more malicious email getting into your system.

4) Don’t fall victim to phishing, brand hijacking, and domain fraud

The most sophisticated email-based attacks are the ones that personal. Attackers convincingly impersonate legitimate businesses, colleagues and even customers to obtain sensitive data and money. Barracuda Sentinel uses artificial intelligence engine to add real-time defense from email-based fraud.

Barracuda Sentinel automatically learns the unique communication patterns of each individual organisation. It uses this knowledge to find anomalous signals in the attributes of the incoming message’s metadata and content. It also adds DMARC (Domain-Based Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance) to track potentially sensitive emails being sent from your organisation.

5) Turn employees into a line of defence against phishing attacks

Phishing attacks are more convincing than ever, and they can be difficult to spot. To complicate matters, the attackers are targeting unsecured personal mail accounts more than ever. As a last line of defence, employees need to get better at spotting socially engineered spear phishing attacks.

Barracuda PhishLine provides leading-edge user awareness training to counter sophisticated phishing and socially engineered spear phishing attacks. PhishLine helps your users sharpen their anti-phishing skills with advanced phishing simulations along with end-user testing, reporting, and comprehensive metrics that let you take prompt and meaningful action against threats.

How can I find out more?

As Barracuda Partners, Complete IT Systems can offer you expert advice on the solutions and how they could be effectively deployed in your business.

To find out more please call us on 01274 396 213 or use our contact form and we’ll arrange a good time to call you back.

Has your business got a reliable backup & data recovery plan?

Backup is one of those activities that is frequently discussed and fretted over, but still not acted upon nearly as regularly as it should be. As part of our buildup to World Backup Day (31st March in case you were wondering!), we’re discussing the need for all-year-round effective backup and data recovery for businesses of all sizes.

The reality is that too often, it’s still not done correctly. It’s easy to treat World Backup Day as a once-yearly reminder, but it’s also a good reminder to get your organisation’s cyber security fit for purpose in the modern era of security risks.

The starting point for this is to get a robust and reliable backup and data recovery (BDR) solution in place.

Where to start?

The first step in the process is making sure that your wider organisation and management team understand the need for data protection – it’s not just “IT’s job”.

With the rise in ransomware and other types of attacks, every business (even smaller ones) needs a documented back up and data recovery plan that is built on a managed data protection service, and is able to recover data when there is a problem.

What are the risks to my organisation?

The cost of data loss and the time and manpower it takes to rebuild servers and computers from scratch.

The price of BDR is always going to be a lot less than the cost of data loss or the reputation loss caused by a ransomware attack. There are also many more options available now for storing data outside the four walls of a your office. It’s easier to back up data, store it, and retrieve it than it was in the past, making cost and convenience objections moot.

Test your recovery capabilities regularly

Besides making sure you back up your organisation’s data both on-premise and offsite, ensure you have a viable recovery plan in place, and that appropriate staff members know what that plan is. It’s also crucial that backups occur regularly — preferably daily. The OS and applications should be part of the backup process as well, and remote user data should be included.

Testing is critical. It’s the only way to validate your ability to restore from a backup. A complete disaster recovery test should be conducted at least once a year, but it’s better if it happens quarterly or monthly. By testing, you can confirm that the data you need is viable and that if something goes wrong, it can be remedied quickly.

While data protection is important year round, World Backup Day is an opportunity to remind yourself about the importance of disaster recovery (DR) and ensure your business has a robust recovery plan in place. Once you’ve backed up your data, make sure that you have the tools and resources in place to make backups more frequent, automated, and reliable across your customer base.

Check out this short video to learn more about Barracuda’s backup solutions:

How can I find out more?

As Barracuda Partners, Complete IT Systems can offer you expert advice on the solutions and how they could be effectively deployed in your business.

To find out more please call us on 01274 396 213 or use our contact form and we’ll arrange a good time to call you back.

Make sure your emails don’t let you down

With cybercrime on the rise and more and more employees and contractors working “on the go”, it’s more important than ever to have the right email security in place for your business.

From your inbox to your employees, you need to know that every avenue a hacker could take is blocked. But with increasingly sophisticated attacks, that’s easier said than done.

Barracuda Total Email Protection ensures your organisation is secured against email-borne threats. Its multi-layered approach combines the most advanced protection available with the radical simplicity and ease of use that Barracuda’s known for.

How easy is it to deploy?

From the IT department’s perspective, you can also avoid the integration chores, uncertain support, and risk that come with building your own solution using point products from unproven startups. The full portfolio of data protection capabilities provides resiliency, and easy recovery from ransomware and accidental data loss, leaving your firm’s email security in the very best hands.

 

 

Want to give it a try?

If you would like to try the solution for yourself, please click here to request your free evaluation.

Further information

The below assets are available to make sure your business is well informed – and safe.

Whitepaper: When Reputation is Not Enough
Whitepaper: Comprehensive Email Filtering
Infographic: Know Your Threats

As Barracuda Diamond Partners, Complete IT Systems can offer you expert advice on the solutions and how they could be effectively deployed in your business.

To find out more please call us on 01274 396 213 or use our contact form and we’ll arrange a good time to call you back.

Cloud security – what are the threats?

While cloud adoption rates continue to grow steadily, cloud security remains a top concern at many organisations, often becoming a roadblock to faster adoption of public cloud infrastructure. This is understandable when you consider the number and variety of threats organisations have to be prepared to combat.

Cloud security – what are the threats?

To get a better understanding of how organisations around the world are using public cloud and the challenges they face, Barracuda recently commissioned independent market research firm Vanson Bourne to survey IT decision makers in EMEA, APAC, and the United States. The results of that research were published in the new report: Future Shock: The Cloud Is the New Network.

Including responses from 750 executives, individual contributors, and team managers with responsibility for or knowledge of their organisation’s cloud infrastructure, the report takes an in-depth look at respondents’ experiences with, and attitudes about, moving infrastructure to the public cloud, concerns restricting adoption, and the security and networking solutions being implemented to overcome them.

New perspectives on cloud challenges

The report reveals some interesting insights into how organisations are approaching public cloud solutions, and what might be holding them back. Highlights from the report include:

  • On average, organisations currently have 45% of IT infrastructure running in the public cloud, but that number is expected to increase to 76% in the next five years.
  • 70% of respondents say security concerns restrict their organisation’s adoption of public cloud.
  • 75% of respondents have already been targeted by a cyber-attack.
  • Only 23% of respondents have already deployed SD-WAN, but another 51% are either in the process of deploying or expect to deploy within the next 12 months.

As more IT infrastructure moves to public cloud, cloud providers will offer more native network capabilities, and public cloud will expand to include more network functionality. The vast majority of organisations need their security vendors to offer advanced security and cloud connectivity tightly integrated with the major cloud platforms.

Read more

Get your copy of Future Shock: The Cloud Is the New Network today to see the full results for yourself and get expert advice on how to embrace public cloud securely.

How can I find out more?

As Barracuda Partners, Complete IT Systems can offer you expert advice on the solutions and how they could be effectively deployed in your business.

To find out more please call us on 01274 396 213 or use our contact form and we’ll arrange a good time to call you back.