The number of phishing emails masquerading as notifications from Microsoft services is skyrocketing, a new report from Check Point warns.
In the report, the researchers say the agency intercepted more than 5,000 such emails in September alone — and to make matters worse, the attackers have become extremely good at creating a legitimate-looking email.
The usual suspects – spelling and grammar, color scheme, the outline of the email – all these things have been done to perfection: “The language is perfect. The style is well known. The graphics look flawless,” the researchers said. “So, what should organizations do?” Additionally, these emails now contain copy-pasted Microsoft privacy policy statements, or links to Microsoft and Bing, making it nearly impossible to spot the ruse with the naked eye.
Training and AI
Ultimately, even the ‘sender’ field in the email now looks credible. Instead of the usual private or unknown domains, these emails appear to come from organizational domains pretending to be legitimate administrators.
All this means that organizations are more likely to lose sensitive information or become infected with malware and even ransomware.
In response, organizations must invest heavily in user awareness training, as employees will no longer be able to look for spelling and grammar errors in phishing emails, Check Point argues.
They also need to deploy AI-based email security, essentially fighting AI with AI, and finally, always keep their software and hardware up to date.
We would add that deploying multi-factor authentication where possible, and even moving to a zero-trust network architecture, can only help in today’s diverse landscape.