The FBI reported in September 2023 that threat actors continue to plant (QR) in several public areas, encouraging users to scan for phishing link exploits.
Trustifi, a leader in advanced AI-email security’s security operation (SecOps) teams, monitors all attacks against their clients. In 2023, the SecOps team tracked a 250% increase in quishing attacks from July to September alone.
How Does Quishing Work?
Email phishing escalates through QR Code exploits to unsuspecting users. These AI-generated, well-crafted emails embedded with a code image can cause credential harvesting links, data theft, and identity theft.
This attack method is rising because the attackers discovered that security solutions don’t scan the QR code in emails/files or follow the redirect link to the final website.
Trustifi added a metric to detect the QR code in emails and files within their AI-powered inbound shield protection layer. The firm has already noticed thousands of Quishing attacks with QR codes in the email content and with QR codes in attachments.
Trustifi AI-Enabled Email Security Critical in Stopping Quishing.
Conventional email security solutions lacking in embedded AI and machine learning protection layers have little to offer organizations regarding preventing quishing attacks. AI-enabled email security solutions like Trustifi have several AI-protection filters with anti-evasion, analyzing embedded URLs, and the ability to stop impersonation attacks from the first email phishing attempt.
AI-enabled email security from Trustifi leverages its vast data sets from within their LLMs to create mature behavior analytics in identifying AI-generated text messages and malicious social engineering content found in code attacks.
Stopping next-generation AI-enabled attacks is at the core of Trustifi’s expertise in email security. The company’s early adoption of AI and machine learning continues to lead the market with greater email protection efficiency and more automated incident response.
Trustifi Protecting Email Attachments from Quishing.
Email attachment protection currently available in most legacy email security solutions lacks the AI capabilities to scan the QR code and identify potential security issues. These QR code attacks could contain URL links within the attachment, not within the body of the message.
This strategy often works well against legacy email security solutions because they are designed to only URLs within the body of the message, not within the attachments.
Trustifi’s advanced AI-enabled inbound shield scans every attachment, looking for key indicators of a QR code attack:
- Does the QR Code URL code contain HTTP or HTTPS prompting the user for a username and password?
- Is the QR code URL domain legitimate or misspelled?
- Is the QR Code redirecting the user to a known phishing site?
- Is the QR code attempting to download malicious malware after the user presses the image?
Trustifi’s powerful AI-filtering engine detects these malicious attack methods, preventing these QR codes from performing attacks against their client’s devices. Trustifi’s AI engines learn over time as more of these types of QR codes morph into new attack vectors. This learning process is the key to Trustifi’s continuous success in stopping AI-enabled hacker attacks.
Trustifi OCR Scanning: A significant change in Preventing QR Code Attacks.
Trustifi extends QCR scanning for QR codes embedded with their award-winning Inbound shield module. The OCR scanning capability inspects the QR code object, looking for embedded URLs and other rogue-related content already examined by Trustifi AI filtering engines. Legacy email security solutions, including secure email gateways, rarely support OCR scanning as part of their security measures.
Bringing Additional Resources to Address QR Code Quishing Attacks: Trustifi EMDR.
Organizations still struggling with retaining valuable security engineer talent can access Trustifi’s email detection and response (EMDR).
As QR code attacks continue to become a problem globally, including increases in email phishing attacks, credential harvesting, and the sheer volume of new attack vectors, EMDR by Trustifi can help scale up your incident response and security operations (SecOps) capabilities within the need to hire a full-time resource.
This managed service delivers exceptional capabilities, including:
- 24×7 monitoring
- Help with DLP rules creation
- Help with enabling additional compliance protection rules.
- Access to expert incident response support
- Access to reporting writing expertise.
Why Trustifi?
Quishing email attacks powered by hacker AI will not go away soon. However, organizations that want to fight “fire with fire” will consider migrating, consolidating, and optimizing their email security, data loss prevention, email encryption, and compliance reporting strategy to Trustifi. With their market-leading AI protection filters, domain impersonation protection, and message encryption, Trustifi simplifies email security while delivering exceptional security protection with their consolidated cloud-based platform.
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.
