Yesterday the Syrian Electronic Army attacked Twitter, Huffington Post UK and the New York Times. Visitors to the New York Times website were greeted with this:
The Washington Post characterized the attacks:
The cyberattacks were among the more sophisticated in a recent series of assaults on high-profile Western media organizations, including The Washington Post and the Associated Press.
Did these attacks demonstrate great technical sophistication? No doubt the SEA has been effective in its efforts to disrupt the media. However, in reality these attacks were technically trivial. SC Magazine is reporting that these attacks were accomplished using . . . . spearphishing. The attackers sent a spearphishing email to a business affiliated with Melbourne IT, the domain registrar used by the media victims. That spearphishing email stole log in credentials to Melbourne IT which allowed the SEA to access Melbourne IT and change the DNS records of the targeted media outlets. Does this demonstrate sophistication? Yes. But the skills that were used were not computer science acumen; the skills that made this made this attack successful were social engineering.
Bruce Tonkin, chief technology officer with Melbourne IT, told SCMagazine.com on Wednesday that he would not reveal the identity of the reseller or the details of the phishing email, but he admitted to being surprised by how authentic the email appeared and explained that he “could see how people could be caught by it,” even “people in the IT industry.”
At Iconix, our goal is to make the spearphishing vector less effective. Spearphishers deceive people into making bad email decisions that compromise security. IT needs to help employees make better email processing decisions. That is where SP Guard comes into play. Using SP Guard, IT can determine a list of trusted senders and provide this information to staff in a simple and highly effective manner.
You can contact us at 408-727-6342,ext 3 or use our online form.