AI-powered phishing and business email compromise (BEC) attacks are gaining notoriety worldwide and have gotten exponentially more sophisticated in recent years.
Phishing emails are indecipherable from legitimate messages and criminals do not need to go to great lengths to create personalized content that deceives recipients.
Unquestionably, it is difficult to keep employees and business leaders secure from nefarious content, and this challenge also spans to files and documents shared in collaboration applications that are prevalent targets of phishing attacks.
According to a recent Perception Point report, 65% of attacks target Microsoft 365 applications such as Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams. With threat actors eyeing popular productivity applications, mitigating the risk of human error is doubly critical to countering email-borne and content-based threats. Because most breaches can be traced back to human error, MSPs are shedding light on the importance of reducing human factors contributing to email compromise and collaboration app phishing with advanced email protection measures.
Human error is at the root of successful breaches
According to the Verizon Data Breach Investigations report, 68% of breaches involved non-malicious human factors. Phishing and BEC attacks have long been the culprit behind the most infamous email attacks. Adversaries are outwitting recipients faster than MSP can respond. The pressure rides on MSPs to prevent and stop such attacks; however, doing so presents complex challenges.
Cyber criminals have turned to AI-powered email attacks for three main reasons: they require minimal investment, time and skill. There are endless use cases for cybercriminals abusing AI, including rapidly composing malware, drafting tailored phishing emails and automating activities in the attack chain AI has become a prime tool. Threat actors are not only bombarding inboxes and better disguising malicious emails by making them more convincing, but also using sophisticated phishing methods to bypass recipients and legacy email security solutions. This allows them to embed malware more deeply into files — and further evade conventional email protection.
Cyber attackers also abuse collaboration applications, including Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. In collaboration app phishing, threat actors recognize that these third-party tools are typically insecure and capitalize on businesses lacking productivity app-centric security. These are cross-channel attacks that target IT environments beyond Microsoft Outlook, Gmail and email tools. Critical applications used to share data-rich files and documents are being abused. When infected assets are shared between employees, stakeholders inadvertently spread malware — thus, the attackers require fewer resources to carry out lateral movement
To prevent attacks, effective protection boils down to Security vendors and clients truly understanding how cybercriminals evade conventional email security and phishing awareness techniques.
By examining current attack trends, security vendors and businesses can better align security against emerging adversarial activities.
