One area in which hackers see continued success with artificial intelligence(AI) enabled tools are email phishing scams filled with malicious links.
Cloud-based AI email security from Trustifi helps organizations stay ahead of hackers’ ability to alter their phishing attempts rapidly.
Legacy Email Security Solutions, Not Enough
Legacy email security systems based on first-generation behavior capabilities successfully stopped these potential threats, including business email compromise(BEC) and other cyber threats against their email clients. However, with the inception of AI-enabled attacks, these legacies of cyber threat intelligence tools became less effective as threat actors changed how they targeted potential victims with accurate-looking email addresses.
By leveraging skills in prompt engineering, hackers continue to create near-perfect phishing content, including using false domains and suspicious links within their messages.
Empowered by their version of (AI) and machine learning(ML) capabilities, hackers continue to adjust their various attack vectors, exploiting users with phishing messages filled with telltale indicators of a phishing scam such as warning signs, grammatical errors, requests for payment details, and a sense of urgency to reply.
Leveraging several AI-filtering engines, Trustifi continuously learns from the attacks to help it better prepare for the next round of adjustments to phishing attacks, mismatching URLs, and domain impersonations.
A True Red Flag Warning? Discovering Suspicious URL Mismatches.
Hackers use phishing emails with fake links to trick people into clicking on dangerous websites.
One sign of phishing is when the hyperlink in the email differs from the website it claims to be linked to. Hackers hide difficult URLs in links, text, logos, and images.
- Users can uncover what’s hidden by hovering over these links. Compare the URL on your screen to the visible URL. If you find the URLs different, mark the message as spam.
- Another red flag users should know is if the link embedded within the message redirects to an older-looking web page, closes the browser, and reports the email as suspicious.
Taking Fake Emails to New Level.
A domain impersonation attack is still one of the most prominent threats organizations face daily. Thanks to DMARC, DKIM, and SPF, these domain authentication strategies have helped organizations prevent their domains from being used in a cyber attack. Using their attack telemetry, hackers will adjust their attacks to a more favorable environment, including using dashes and symbols within the sending domain.
A red flag? Absolutely.
For example, www.apple.com, hackers would create a lookalike email domain like www.support-apple.com. The hacker will take control of this domain and use it in their attack. Email security tools will scan the sending parts and check for violations against DMARC, DKIM, and SPF.
Hackers will alter the domain even further by adding www.support-apple.com.cust_login_i.e. Then, i.e., now becomes the domain, not support-apple.com. Users see this URL, suspecting they will log into an Apple support site.
Within the email, if none of the content had anything to do with Apple support, the AI-powered email security solutions from Trustifi would block this message by determining this as a redirection to a suspicious website.
How to Identify These Risks?
Phishing emails often use subjects to spark a sense of fear or urgency in the suspected victim. If the email security solution identifies an inbound email with the words “urgent, warning, or IRS,” the email security will quarantine this message.
Hackers will see this within the attack telemetry and adjust their subject lines until the messages pass through to the end user.
This real-time adjustment is the growing risk organizations are witnessing in these next-generation unsolicited email attacks. Hackers can alter the phishing message in real time, including the email body, email header, subject line, and malicious attachments. Using FraudGPT and WormGPT, the hackers can repackage the email phishing link and resend it to a broader attack surface.
Using Trustifi’s AI-powered email security platform, this advanced inbound email filtering helps prevent these next-generation looks for domain mismatches, impostor domains, and looking for fraudulent terms and characters embedded within the URL strings.
The Power of AI For Email Security, A Must.
Stopping these AI-enabled attacks, fraudulent emails, and embedded dangerous links required more than just additional security operations engineers, a well-trained end-user community, or traditional secure email gateway devices. Organizations looking to replace their legacy security should look into cloud-based platforms from Trustifi, powered by AI, to protect phishing victims from cyber criminals redirecting users to shady websites, harmful attachments, and scam websites.
Powered by a next-generation mature AI platform, Trustifi helps prevent these mismatched URL and domain impersonation attacks. Using the latest AI filtering capabilities, Trustifi constantly learns from suspicious activity captured with their security data telemetry. Combining its inbound-shield functionality with outbound data loss prevention and tokenization, Trustifi helps clients prevent data loss because of these complex attacks.
Why Trustifi?
Trustifi offers a consolidated solution pricing to support small and midsize enterprise marketplaces. Trustifi requires fewer security operations, time allocation, and management resources.
Trustifi’s agile platform offers several proven security controls to help prevent the following attacks:
- BEC Protection: Trustifi protection: Trustifi’s AI is trained and designed to detect text-based emails to perform employee BEC social engineering attacks.
- Next-Gen Email Phishing: Trustifi uses AI, feeds, and proprietary metrics to detect and quarantine malicious emails, URLs, and files that aim to steal the recipient’s data.
- Impersonation (known as spear phishing): Trustifi’s advanced email security platform detects and tags the impersonation of the recipient’s contacts to ensure safe correspondence with a genuine connection. Also, it can identify actual emails from a brand.
Account compromised: Trustifi protection: Trustifi has unique metrics to detect malicious emails even though they come from a known contact and allows listed senders.
