Phishing: What’s Spam Got to Do With It?

Phishing is like spam in only one respect. They both come across email.

In all other ways they’re quite different.

People sending spam are trying to sell you something. People sending

phishing attacks are trying to steal something from you. One type of

communication is from a marketer — whether legitimate or not. The other

is from a thief. Further, spam is quite obviously spam, but phishing is

getting increasingly difficult to detect. According to Word Spy, phishing

is defined as: ‘Creating a replica of an existing Web page to fool a user

into submitting personal, financial, or password data.’

Despite what’s at stake, many are ill prepared to deal with the

increasing phishing threat. A common mistake that IT administrators make

is to assume their spam solutions are equipped to handle phishing.

Though phishing comes through traditional email channels, it often

bypasses gateways and spam filters by exploiting trusted domains and

relationships. If you rely on authentication, a phisher who hijacks a

trusted Web site can easily penetrate your system. If you operate with

white lists and black lists, a hacker who has harvested those lists can

send phishing attacks from a white list address. The Anti-Phishing

Working Group (APWG) reports that more than 3,326 phishing sites were

operating as of May 2005, with more than 107 trusted brands having been

hijacked to perpetrate attacks.

”People feel that if they have a spam solution, they’re protected from

phishing, but that’s not the case,” says Jordan Ritter, CTO of

Cloudmark, an anti-spam solutions company based in San Francisco. ”The

nature of the problem, the attacks, and the form they take are incredibly

different. Period. The way phishers operate and the way they send their

mail is different, as well. There’s no grey area there. They’re stealing

your money, assets, and information.

”For that reason, they have a lot more to lose, and move between systems

quickly. They’re a lot more sophisticated in taking advantage of security

vulnerabilities, whereas spammers are trying to direct you to someone’s

Web site to buy something.”

It becomes an even more daunting threat when you consider that a majority

of corporate IT and security administrators must defend more than one

source of email.

Different Strategies

Companies that allow users to access their personal email through free

email service providers must ensure that they’ve also added protective

measures to that avenue of communication. The transient and seemingly

invisible nature of phishing makes it a highly effective method of

getting by generic spam solutions.

”Unlike spam, it’s not something that you’re going to be able to measure

in terms of mail flow and volume and complaints,” says Ritter. ”When

you get stung with a phishing attack, you don’t really know it. It’s not

an easy thing for the enterprise to measure. However, it’s still a very

real problem and when it relates to security, instead of simply mail

administration, the corporation has a lot more to lose by not protecting

its users. From that aspect, it’s perhaps a greater liability for them.”

Clearly, traditional spam solutions aren’t enough. Without obvious traces

of the incidents, and the sophistication of the attacks increasing, what

measures can a company take to effectively avoid becoming a victim?

”Anti-phishing is the newest area of Internet security,” says the

APWG’s Dave Jevans. ”There are a number of companies providing

innovative products and services in this area, but it’s still a new and

evolving science. Also, internal education can be an important factor.

This is especially true when educating employees about avoiding internal

phishing, i.e., attacks designed to spoof IT administrators and steal

access credentials to internal systems.”

Over the past few years, it’s been shown that layered security provides

the highest form of defense in depth. The same is true when dealing with

organizational phishing. Taking a proactive approach to bolstering the

email infrastructure makes it much more difficult to find a way into your

network.

The IT director of a popular Northern California Web services portal (who

declined to be identified) provides a good example of having implemented

this methodology.

”As a company, there are about four steps that we take,” says the IT

director. ”The first is corporate-wide user education to define phishing

and what it looks like. The second thing we do is subscribe to some of

the phishing notification newswires, and when we receive word of the

latest phishing attacks, we’ll assess them to see if we need to notify

the entire staff. Third, we are actively evaluating several vendors’

anti-phishing related plug-ins in the lab.

”Lastly, though it’s really the front of the architecture,

implementation of appropriate tools is critical,” the IT director adds.

”While we have drawn a distinction between spam and phishing, one of our

installed vendor products has the ability to catch them both. When I look

at my personal email, outside of our network system, I see plenty of

phishing. When I look at my mail inside our network, it’s apparent that

we do not get phished in the corporate system. We have indeed built a

number of different layers behind that, but I can’t remember the last

time a phish got through our system.”

Approaching the threat from various avenues provides a more unified

defense mechanism against a shape-shifting enemy. Through a combination

of policy, process, education, and tools, it is possible to build a

better fortress. Yet with every security challenge, there is no magic

bullet.

Unfortunately for corporate America, there always will be so much out

there for criminals to take advantage of.

RELATED NEWS AND ANALYSIS

• Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: Driving Greater Equality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  December 16, 2020

• AI vs. Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  December 11, 2020

• Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  December 04, 2020

• Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 18, 2020

• Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  November 10, 2020

• Top 10 AIOps Companies

  FEATURE |  By Samuel Greengard,
  November 05, 2020

• What is Text Analysis?

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 02, 2020

• How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 29, 2020

• Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 23, 2020

• The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 16, 2020

• Top 10 Chatbot Platforms

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  October 07, 2020

• Finding a Career Path in AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  October 05, 2020

• CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  September 25, 2020

• Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 25, 2020

• Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2021

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  September 22, 2020

• NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 18, 2020

• Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 14, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 13, 2020

• IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 11, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  September 09, 2020