SMX launches new anti-phishing software to combat
sophisticated email fraud
attacks
21
June 2016, Auckland, New Zealand. SMX Limited, New
Zealand’s largest cloud email security company, has
launched new software enhancements to its SMX SmartRules®
software designed to protect against sophisticated email
phishing fraud.
SMX Chief Technology Officer,
Thom Hooker, says sophisticated variations of phishing (or
targeted email attacks) – termed ‘spear phishing’ and
‘whaling’ respectively – represent the most serious
cybersecurity threat currently facing New Zealand businesses
and organisations.
“There are companies out there right
now losing substantial amounts of money, confidential
information, or both. A number of law firms have been hit
particularly hard,” Hooker says.
Spear phishing and
whaling are forms of targeted email attack, or phishing,
Hooker explains, where a combination of social engineering
and email spoofing techniques is used to steal money or
confidential information from businesses – and it is
becoming increasingly prevalent.
Spear phishing targets a group of people – for
example, employees or customers of a specific company, or
even a specific person.
Whaling is a variation of spear
phishing that targets high-level executives with the
objective of conning them into sharing confidential company
information. A fraudster may, for example, identify key
executives with funds transfer authorisation, and send
counterfeit emails authorising funds transfers, using those
executives’ details.
To combat both spear phishing and
whaling attacks specifically, SMX has developed new
algorithms and new ‘rules’ have been added to SMX’s
SmartRules® module, Hooker says. These allow SMX, or an
organisation’s IT department, or an external IT service
provider, to create and apply new rules and supporting
processes to protect identified likely or known spear
phishing or whaling targets within an organisation.
New
functions have also been enabled on SMX’s email security
filters to further interrogate the metadata associated with
each email. These new features detect and remove spear
phishing and whaling attacks in real time from SMX’s
customers’ email flow without the end-user needing to
enable them.
For example, Hooker says, whaling and spear
phishing attacks rely on a mismatch between what the target
sees in their mail client and what is ‘parsed’ by the
mail server. By providing SMX with a list of potential spear
phishing and whaling targets and victims, along with the
normal email addresses they send from, SMX’s DLP (data loss
prevention) engine is configured to block or quarantine any
emails which have mismatches.
For very high risk whaling
targets, an even more stringent layer can be added where
only authorised email addresses are allowed through the
filters. This does require creating and maintaining a list
of authorised addresses associated with each target.
However, once this rule is set up maintenance is only
required when list members change and this can be carried
out by the customer’s IT team with minimal
training.
“The bottom line is that email security has to
be dynamic and able to respond quickly with new defences to
new threats as they emerge. A key strength of SMX is that as
a cloud service we can implement new defences for all of our
customers literally in real time,” Hooker says.
For a
full analysis of phishing threats and measures to combat
phishing fraudsters see Thom Hooker’s latest blog
Phishing for your
business.
ENDS