In a new video, American Banker discusses the ease with which hackers can deceive email recipients.
In the video, the reporters discuss how a security expert crafted an email from one reporter to the other. The recipient, being deceived into believing that the hacker was a colleague, opened the fake email. Why? Because it is impossible to easily determine that the fake email was fake.
American Banker concludes:
Social engineering attacks — also known as phishing and spear-phishing — are on the rise against banks and their corporate customers. The stakes are high and rising for both.
Social engineering deceives users into becoming the agents of the criminals. How can you defend your organization against hackers impersonating co-workers? The enterprise can adopt a tool that identifies trusted email so that the target of the spear-phishing attack can distinguish real email from fake email. That tool is SP Guard from Iconix.
SP Guard provides the recipient with three confirmations that a message is real:
- List View. There is an integrity indicator in the list view of the email client.
- Message. The open message has a further indicator of authenticity.
- Mouseover. Mousing over the authentication indicator in the message prompts the display of a certificate that further identifies the sender.
SP Guard is available now from Iconix. For further information, contact us at 408-727-6342, ext 3 or use our online form.