According to the APWG Phishing Activity Trends Report, APWG observed a total of 1,270,883 phishing attacks in the third quarter of 2022. This troublesome figure set a new record for such cyberthreats and accounts for the worst quarter for phishing that APWG has ever observed. This ominous milestone means there will be 9 potential phishing victims who receive phishing email every 60 seconds.
Phishing attacks are one of the most concerning threats facing organizations and users today. As cybercriminals become increasingly resourceful, and as the hybrid workforce continues to grow, enterprises are demanding better defensive strategies and tools to combat today’s virulent phishing attacks. Anti-phishing measures, such as zero-trust security models, are effective ways to protect enterprises from phishing attacks. CDNetworks’ Enterprise Secure Access (ESA) is a cloud service that provides a zero-trust security model to identify and block phishing email.
What Does a Phishing Email Look Like?
Before we explain how ESA blocks phishing email, it is important to understand what a phishing email is.
Attackers often disguise themselves as a CEO, financial staff, partner, well-known institution, or other trusted authority and send deceptional email that appears to be legitimate with the intent to induce the recipient to reveal personal information, such as passwords and credit card numbers. Once they obtain this information, the attackers can masquerade as a legitimate user to gain access to networks, launch malware including ransomware and viruses, steal or damage sensitive data, and initiate other nefarious acts for fraudulent purposes.
Why Your Employees Still Fall Prey to Phishing Email
Despite being trained on the risks of phishing email, individuals continue to click questionable email without thinking twice. Why do your employees buy into phishing email when they have been warned time and again about the dangers associated with phishing scams?
The root causes of these attacks can be attributed to the following four reasons.
Insufficient Email Security Awareness
As the saying goes, Rome was not built in a day. So, too, with phishing. Enforcing email security to protect your organization’s primary communication ecosystem is not always easy, even if you have previously conducted such training sessions with your employees.
An Outdated Threat Library of Anti-phishing Software
Enterprises that implement anti-phishing measures may not always keep their anti-phishing software or services up to date. In addition, the complexity and sophistication of today’s phishing email can defeat the capabilities of anti-phishing software or services. And even if anti-phishing software or services are sufficiently robust to repel phishing email, there is no defense for naive employees who fall prey to convincing phishing scams.
Bypassing the Anti-spams with Circumvention Techniques
The best first line of defense is to block phishing email before users have an opportunity to click it. For this reason, companies have adopted anti-spam or anti-phishing software to boost their email security by filtering all email. Even this approach may fall short when it comes to deterring sophisticated hackers, whose bag of tricks include a myriad of tools and techniques designed to bypass anti-spam filters.
Zero-day Vulnerability of Your Anti-phishing Software
The same solutions you use to fight phishing attempts could actually be vulnerable to such attacks. This is especially true if your anti-phishing software or tools were developed with open source components, such as Apache Log4j2, which have inherent zero-day vulnerabilities and leave your organization exposed to phishing and zero-day attacks.
Prevent Data Breaches in Phishing Attacks with CDNetworks’ Zero Trust Security Model
The final goal of phishing attackers is to acquire the financial information, system credentials, and other sensitive data for blackmail or other fraudulent purposes. It is paramount to prevent data breaches before they occur. Building a zero-trust security model is one of the best strategies that enterprises can take to protect against network intrusions.
CDNetworks’ ESA is a cloud service that uses a Zero Trust implementation with a Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP) infrastructure to control access to and from any platform in any environment on any device.
Taking advantage of key core capabilities, such as the threat intelligence library, risk evaluation, secure workspace, file kill, dynamic access control, and transfer control of outbound data, CDNetworks provides a comprehensive anti-phishing solution to help you fight against phishing attacks threats as soon as they are encountered, minimizing the time needed to detect an intrusion.
Phase 1: Blocking Access to Phishing Website
CDNetworks’ ESA blocks visits to the dangerous website in two ways to prevent data breaches. First, before users access a target website, ESA’s built-in secure web gateway (SWG) inspects the website and its traffic between user and website using advanced threat intelligence and URL filters. If the URLs are not allowed by the enterprise’s network policy or pose a security risk, the SWG denies users from accessing the website. ESA also supports remote browser isolation (RBI), which enables remote access to unknown websites and applications, and returns secure content to users. By using these two methods, our zero-trust security solution ESA effectively prevents phishing, ransomware, and other internet risks.
Moreover, ESA, is a zero-trust security solution that provides a secure workspace for enterprises to manage their confidential applications and data in an isolated workspace, and apply strict access and operation limitations to users who are granted access to this workspace. In this workspace, enterprises can set up different limitations on file downloads, copy and paste operations, and file transfer control to secure internal access and data security. In this way, even hackers that penetrate into your network will be stopped dead in their tracks and prevented from entering the secure workspace to steal data or introduce malware.
Phase 2: Strengthen Your Account to Block Mock Logins
CDNetworks’ ESA supports multifactor authentication (MFA), which prevents attackers from using acquired credentials to penetrate into your organization’s applications. Using MFA, along with the best practices of enforcing strong password verification, changing passwords periodically, and creating temporary access, are just a few ways that ESA helps you prevent attackers from acquiring valid account credentials.
Phase 3: Antivirus Detection and Protection for the Email Attachment or Fileless Malware
ESA’s integrated Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) capability gives you the power to secure unmanaged device access through endpoint detection and response across your distributed locations and dispersed workforce. If users open or execute files in phishing email, the ESA client detects the email attachments (such as an executable file, for example), identifies the viruses, malware, and trojans, and then disposes of the file to mitigate the threat. In addition to file malware, CDNetworks’ ESA also identifies and removes fileless malware, which works directly within a computer’s memory instead of a hard drive and uses legitimate programs to compromise your computer instead of malicious files.
Phase 4: Continuous Evaluation & Control on Preventing Data Breaches
Attackers can circumvent firewalls and secure infrastructures by communicating from any IP address and inserting themselves into a trusted remote host. But they can’t attack what they can’t see. With this strategy in mind, CDNetworks’ ESA uses Single Packet Authorization (SPA) technology to authenticate every packet sent to an enterprise’s internet-facing server without opening any server ports. If the packet is authenticated, the packet is believed to be legitimate and a port on the server is opened to the authorized user; otherwise, the packet is assumed to be bogus and the internet-facing server is rendered “invisible” to the outside world to prevent actors from moving laterally within the network and leveraging the compromise of a single port to compromise the entire network.
Based on the User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) model, CDNetworks’ ESA detects abnormal behaviors, including account takeover fraud, abnormal location, overstepping privilege, and connection flood. CDNetworks’ ESA goes even further by enforcing dynamic access control permissions and restrictions that can include the sensitivity of a resource, a user’s job or role, and the configuration of a device used to access the resource. For example, users might have one set of permissions when accessing a resource from their office computer and a different set of permissions if they use a personal device over a virtual private network. In this way, ESA allows you to manage access to prevent data breaches before phishing attacks can succeed.
With these measures for blocking phishing email and preventing the damage they bring, CDNetworks ESA empowers organizations to prevent data breaches with multiple zero-trust technologies in ways that go beyond other solutions.
Strengthen Your Email Security before Data Breaches
Data is invaluable, and phishing attacks put data in jeopardy. Even the most well-known companies have suffered phishing attacks and lost enormous amounts of money and suffered tarnished reputations. Now is the time to strengthen your email security! To learn more about CDNetworks’ ESA solution and how it can protect your organization against multiple threats, please contact us or click here for a free trial.
