Whale phishing attacks include social engineering tactics, fraudulent messages, and websites disguised as real and urgent. The whale messages appear to be critical business emails from someone within a c-suite executive role who is legitimately qualified.
Cloud-based advanced email security platforms offer a variety of security controls to align with the client’s security compliance and posture requirements. These advanced platforms bring together a collection of adaptive rules designed to help stop whaling attacks against C-level executives.
Where Did Whaling Phishing Originate?
Whaling in cybersecurity has become a standard method of attack targeting executives as potential victims. Cybercriminals could use this method to impersonate senior officials in specific organizations.
This method of impersonation attack is one of many phishing techniques used by hackers.
Usually, a top executive, such as a CEO or chief accountant, becomes a whaling victim. Executive fraud also termed CEO fraud; hackers will attempt to trick executives by getting them to enable unauthorized users to access information on websites and other websites or transfer money.
With whaling, phishing hackers focus on detailed research on their target organizations, extensive knowledge of a business process & plans on how to execute them as part of their cybersecurity strategy.
Most whaling phishing emails contain a false message filled with a sense of urgency or a pending crisis designed to throw the executive off-balance, prompting a quick response.
Similar to other phishing attacks, these messages attempt to trick the executives and other high-profile leaders within the organizations into responding to the hackers’ demands.
Trolling Social Media looking for Executive Targets
Social media profiles are invaluable for gaining insight into social engineering attacks. An attacker might learn a high-ranking executive’s last known employment or industry organization they could be a member of. Keeping the executive’s profile private helps prevent unauthorized access to sensitive contact information.
Many successful whaling attacks start with a legitimate email from a hacker who harvested a known contact somewhere on social media related to the victim. Often, executives will leave their profiles locked down to prevent unapproved users from accessing critical pieces embedded within their profiles.
Business Email Compromise
Cybercriminals will research public and private organizations, including 10K report findings, news reports, and changes in leadership personnel. They will use this intelligence to plan their multi-level phishing attacks. A whaling attack will target a high-ranking employee, while spear-phishing emails will target a lower-level employee in finance or accounting. The phishers will also target a supply chain partner.
By executing a multi-tier phishing campaign using various techniques, including whaling, spear, and impersonation, they hope to manipulate several victims simultaneously. Each phishing message could be a series of demands or different instructions, including requesting money, copying trade secrets, and downloading malicious payloads.
Migrating to the Next-Generation Email Security Platform-as-a-Service
Cloud-based holistic platforms are rapidly displacing legacy email security solutions by leveraging several independent vendor offers. Many advanced cloud-based email solutions merge several cybersecurity features into a unified management center with tighter integration, leaving less room for hackers to exploit. Clients can now enable only the tools that align with their business needs instead of the one size fits all model.
Organizations Targeted with Advanced Whaling Phishing
Whaling attacks continue to negatively affect organizations even with advancements in email security and employee security awareness training. Whaling phishing, similar to other phishing emails, preys on human emotion.
CEOs have become a perfect target for whaling phishing tactics because many executives will often have assistants screen their emails before they read the contents. Many C-levels often will use auto-filtering to select email boxes to manage communication volume. Phishing messages could resonate in the email folders for months waiting for an admin or executive to open and release malware or perform other cyber attacks.
Organizations trying to get ahead of whaling continue to invest in security awareness training to help provide a basic level of education to the executives and their assistants on identifying whaling attacks. Organizations should invest in security awareness training for all departments.
Organizations must enable several layers of email security controls beyond security awareness training to stop complex whaling attacks.
With market-leading cloud-based email security providers like Trustifi, clients can take advantage of several capabilities from the same platform, including:
- Advanced multi-tier artificial intelligence
- Machine learning capabilities,
- Fully integrated inbound and outbound protection engines
- Data loss prevention protection
- One-click full email encryption
These advanced layers of email security include intelligence email scanning of keywords used in whaling attack emails and identifying and blocking malicious email attachments and suspicious URLs.
Messaging Authentication
Trustifi also supported full DEMARC, DKIM, and SPF for email DNS authentication services to help stop business email compromise and impersonation attacks against profile executives and senior management.
Another critical feature Trustifi offers is multifactor authentication for senior executives to leverage to validate secure emails.
Trustifi integrates two-factor authentication directly into the receipt process. This additional step is streamlined and straightforward yet crucial for verifying that allowed individuals only access sensitive information.
It works like this: anytime an encrypted email is sent with Trustifi, the intended recipient must authenticate their identity in one of three ways pre-selected by the sender. This additional layer of security ensures message integrity between executive officers.
Safe lists and Deny listing
These advanced capabilities include support for executive safe listing and deny listing. Using these two powerful tools, clients can enable safe lists or deny-specific lists on executive mailboxes to help protect against whaling attacks. Within these lists, clients can set which emails could be blocked and quarantined or allowed to pass through the executive’s inbox.
Why Trustifi?
Trustifi is a cyber security firm featuring solutions delivered on software as a service platform with a multi-layered protection strategy. Trustifi leads the market with the easiest-to-use and deploys email security products, providing both inbound and outbound email security from a single vendor.
- Trustifi offers a merged solution pricing to support small and midsize enterprise marketplaces. Trustifi requires fewer security operations, time allocation, and management resources.
- The solution is API based, not an appliance requiring a complex re-configuration of your email flow. Trustifi installs in minutes and requires no maintenance or upkeep.
- Trustifi’s Email detection and response (EMDR) Offers clients access to experts to assist with the implementation.
Trustifi’s fully integrated platform-as-a-service(PAAS) platform is managed through a single console requiring MFA through OKTA and another market leader MFAs. Clients can select which features within the Trustifi console they wish to enable at their discretion. Clients can allow these security consoles through a single click inside the consolidated management center if they have one or several compliance mandates to meet.
As a global cybersecurity provider of both inbound and outbound email protection, Trustifi currently supports customers from countries including the USA, Canada, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, the UK, the Netherlands, India, the UAE, China, and Japan, Cyprus, the Philippines, and more. The company has also developed “One-Click Compliance” capabilities that cater to world security regulations, including PDPO for Hong Kong, POPI for South Africa, GDPR for Europe, and LGPD for Brazil.
