Detecting And Combating Malicious Email

Malicious email is, simply put, email with a malicious purpose. The malicious purpose could be fraud, theft, espionage, or malware injection. The processes by which email execute the malicious activity vary widely, from fully manual (e.g. human-directed) to fully automated. One example of a malicious email is one that contains an attachment which the recipient is directed to open. When the attachment is opened, malicious software is installed on the recipient's computer. Because malicious email can vary so broadly in form and function, automated detection is only marginally helpful. The education of all users to detect potential malicious email is important to containing the threat and limiting the damage. It is increasingly necessary for all email users to understand how to recognize and combat malicious email. Detecting and Combating Malicious Email describes the different types of malicious email, shows how to differentiate malicious email from benign email, and suggest protective strategies for both personal and enterprise email environments. - Discusses how and why malicious e-mail is used - Explains how to find hidden viruses in e-mails - Provides hands-on concrete steps to detect and stop malicious e-mail before it is too late - Covers what you need to do if a malicious e-mail slips through

Learn how to detect, analyze, and respond to phishing emails, the top infection vector used by cybercriminals. The repeatable process described in this book has been cultivated and tested in real-life incidents and validated across multiple threat landscapes and environments. Every organization and individual with an email account is susceptible to deceptive emails sent by attackers with nefarious intentions. This activity, known as phishing, involves an attacker attempting to lure individuals into providing sensitive information or performing a predetermined action. Attacks vary in sophistication, but the core skills and process to detect, analyze, and respond to a suspicious message does not change. Attackers have preyed on victims with convincing and not-so-convincing phishing emails to gain initial footholds into networks around the world for over 30 years. This attack method has been rapidly growing in popularity and continues to be the number one method that organizations and individuals struggle to defend against. Regardless of what any vendor or organization will tell you, no infallible tool exists to eliminate this threat completely. This book teaches you how to analyze suspicious messages using free tools and resources. You will understand the basics of email, tactics used by attackers, and a repeatable process to systematically analyze messages and respond to suspicious activity. You Will Learn How to: Safely save email messages as attachments for analysis Identify what information is in an email header Review header information and extract key indicators or patterns used for detection Identify signs of a suspicious or malicious email message Detect the tactics that attackers use in phishing emails Safely examine email links and attachments Use a variety of free and simple tools to analyze email messages.

An essential anti-phishing desk reference for anyone with an email address Phishing Dark Waters addresses the growing and continuing scourge of phishing emails, and provides actionable defensive techniques and tools to help you steer clear of malicious emails. Phishing is analyzed from the viewpoint of human decision-making and the impact of deliberate influence and manipulation on the recipient. With expert guidance, this book provides insight into the financial, corporate espionage, nation state, and identity theft goals of the attackers, and teaches you how to spot a spoofed e-mail or cloned website. Included are detailed examples of high profile breaches at Target, RSA, Coca Cola, and the AP, as well as an examination of sample scams including the Nigerian 419, financial themes, and post high-profile event attacks. Learn how to protect yourself and your organization using anti-phishing tools, and how to create your own phish to use as part of a security awareness program. Phishing is a social engineering technique through email that deceives users into taking an action that is not in their best interest, but usually with the goal of disclosing information or installing malware on the victim's computer. Phishing Dark Waters explains the phishing process and techniques, and the defenses available to keep scammers at bay. Learn what a phish is, and the deceptive ways they've been used Understand decision-making, and the sneaky ways phishers reel you in Recognize different types of phish, and know what to do when you catch one Use phishing as part of your security awareness program for heightened protection Attempts to deal with the growing number of phishing incidents include legislation, user training, public awareness, and technical security, but phishing still exploits the natural way humans respond to certain situations. Phishing Dark Waters is an indispensible guide to recognizing and blocking the phish, keeping you, your organization, and your finances safe.

There are an increasing number of emails purporting to be from a trusted entity that attempt to deceive users into providing account or identity information, commonly known as phishing emails. Traditional spam filters are not adequately detecting these undesirable emails, and this causes problems for both consumers and businesses wishing to do business online. From a learning perspective, this is a challenging problem. At first glance, the problem appears to be a simple text classification problem, but the classification is confounded by the fact that the class of phishing emails is nearly identical to the class of real emails. We propose a new method for detecting these malicious emails called PILFER. By incorporating features specifically designed to highlight the deceptive methods used to fool users, we are able to accurately classify over 92% of phishing emails, while maintaining a false positive rate on the order of 0.1%. These results are obtained on a dataset of approximately 860 phishing emails and 6950 non-phishing emails. The accuracy of PILFER on this dataset is significantly better than that of SpamAssassin, a widely-used spam filter.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th European Symposium on Computer Security, ESORICS 2012, held in Pisa, Italy, in September 2012. The 50 papers included in the book were carefully reviewed and selected from 248 papers. The articles are organized in topical sections on security and data protection in real systems; formal models for cryptography and access control; security and privacy in mobile and wireless networks; counteracting man-in-the-middle attacks; network security; users privacy and anonymity; location privacy; voting protocols and anonymous communication; private computation in cloud systems; formal security models; identity based encryption and group signature; authentication; encryption key and password security; malware and phishing; and software security.

Abstract: Many techniques are available to combat the spread of unwanted emails and online spams. One popular technique is content-based Bayesian filters. Spammers have found techniques to defeat these filters. A structure-based anti-spam technique uses a different approach to the spam problem by checking for the structure of a message instead of its content. The structure of an email is extracted from the DOM (Document Object Model) of the HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) in the email. We implemented a tree-based comparison and quadratic weighted level scoring system to find similarities between emails. This method is used for email classification so that similar emails can be grouped together. Upon classification of an email, we compared the domain of the email to the whitelisted domains. If the domains do not match we label the email as a spam. The experimental results showed a high success rate of spam detection and email classification.