Monthly Archives: September 2015

Chinese Hacking Secrets Revealed

The secret behind Chinese hacking has been revealed by ThreatConnect. CNN Money reports:

The hackers’ techniques don’t sound very sophisticated: They send innocent-looking emails to unsuspecting recipients, whose computers then get infected with malware that trawls for sensitive information.

This graphic from ThreatConnect shows the key role played by spearphishing.

threatconnect

Source: ThreatConnect

This simple technique is devastatingly effective because it is easy to create an email that deceives users into taking the actions desired by the attackers. In its September 24, 2015 first page story, “Sleuths Link Hacker to China’s Military,” the Wall Street Journal describes how a spearphishing email works. The Wall Street Journal writes,

The email attachment would tempt anyone following the diplomatic standoff between China and other countries in the South China Sea.

How can you help your users fight being deceived? Use SP Guard from Iconix. SP Guard lets IT quickly and easily tell users which senders are trusted.

Iconix Issued Seventh U.S. Patent For Email

ICONIX, Inc., the industry leader in visual email solutions, announced on September 15, 2015, that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued Iconix’s seventh patent titled “User interface for email inbox to call attention differently to different classes of email.” The abstract for U.S. Patent 9,137,048, dated September 15, 2015, states: “Sender emails have their Truemarks (icons) displayed in the sender column of a list view” and “fraudulent emails have a fraud icon displayed with a warning in the sender column.”

9137048

Technology from this patent is used in all of the Iconix® offerings, including the Iconix Truemark® service, which helps protect consumer users from phishing attacks, and Iconix SP GuardTM, which helps protect enterprises from spear-phishing attacks. The Iconix services utilize the two main forms of email authentication – Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) – to verify the source of a message, and then highlight legitimate email messages with an icon in the inbox and open messages. This gives users an intuitive “visual ID” for email messages, thus allowing them to quickly assess the legitimacy of messages. The result is increased trust and confidence in email and increased safety for users and businesses.

You can read the full press release here.