Stay secure with the latest email security updates, best practices, and threat alerts to protect your inbox and sensitive information.
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Background for this topic.
Email is a system for exchanging digital messages, typically using mail servers and clients over a network. In security, it includes both the messages and the accounts, servers, domains, and authentication mechanisms that handle them. Email commonly carries phishing links, malicious attachments, and fraudulent requests for payments or credentials; compromised accounts can also be used to impersonate trusted people and conduct further attacks.
Defenses include filtering and malware scanning, phishing-resistant multifactor authentication, careful handling of links and attachments, and monitoring for unusual login or sending activity. Domain controls such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC help receiving systems detect messages that are forged or sent without authorization, while encryption protects message contents in transit or at rest when correctly implemented. Security teams should preserve relevant headers and mailbox activity so suspicious messages can be investigated, removed, and used to identify affected accounts and other recipients.
A majority of enterprises that employ cloud-based email spam filtering services are potentially at risk, thanks to a rampant tendency to misconfigure them.
Thread hijacking attacks. They happen when someone you know has their email account compromised, and you are suddenly dropped into an existing conversation between the sender and someone else. These missives draw on the recipient's natural curiosity about being copied on a private discussion, which is modified to include a malicious link or attachment. Here's the story of a recent thread hijacking attack in which a journalist was copied on a phishing email from the unwilling subject of a recent scoop.
In June 2017, a study of more than 3,000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students published by the National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER) found that 98% of them were willing to give away their friends' email addresses in exchange for free pizza
Indian government entities and energy companies have been targeted by unknown threat actors with an aim to deliver a modified version of an open-source information stealer malware called HackBrowserData and exfiltrate sensitive information in some cases by using Slack as command-and-control (C2)
A new phishing campaign has been observed leveraging a novel loader malware to deliver an information stealer and keylogger called Agent Tesla
Plus: Alleged front sanctioned, UK blames PRC for Electoral Commission theft, and does America need a Cyber Force? The United States on Monday accused seven Chinese men of breaking into computer networks, email accounts, and cloud storage belonging to numerous critical infrastructure organizations, companies, and individuals, including politicians and their political parties.…
The UK’s NCSC assesses that China-backed APT31 was “almost certainly” responsible for hacking the email accounts of UK parliamentarians
Systems have been pulled offline as a precaution Exclusive The Communications Workers Union (CWU), which represents hundreds of thousands of employees in sectors across the UK economy including tech and telecoms, is currently working to mitigate a cyberattack.…
A new large-scale StrelaStealer malware campaign has impacted over a hundred organizations across the United States and Europe, attempting to steal email account credentials. [...]