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The single best thing you can do to reduce cybersecurity risk in your environment is to prevent and mitigate social engineering – phishing in particular. The first and best thing any IT security administrator should do is to prevent social engineering and phishing from getting to their end users, as best they can. It requires the best, defense-in-depth combination of policies and technical defenses.
If you are interested in everything you can possibly do to mitigate phishing, check out our anti-phishing e-book or phishing mitigation webinar , both dedicated to fighting phishing.
But no matter how much you try to prevent social engineering and phishing from getting to your end users, some amount of it will end up in the user’s inbox, browser or phone. No preventative defense has yet to defeat phishing attacks. Because of this, all end users should be trained to spot social engineering and phishing which made it past preventative controls – and taught what to do (which is hopefully report and delete).
There are times when an end user will receive an email or a website pop-up (or a message over some other media channel like a text message or voice call), where it is not readily apparent if the message is a social engineering or phishing attack. In those cases, the end user can try to look for clues which will better help them determine the legitimacy or report that potential phishing instance to someone else who can conduct an investigation. If the legitimacy cannot be determined, the phishing attempt should be ignored, reported and deleted. “When in doubt, chicken out!”
But in most cases, the social engineering and phishing instance can be investigated by the end user or the appropriate IT person to determine legitimacy. Here are the steps anyone can take to forensically examine a social engineering or phishing attack.
This is email phishing forensics phishing 101. If I get an email, it is the steps I take, and you can take, to quickly determine maliciousness or legitimacy. If I can’t determine if an email or URL is legitimate or not within a few minutes (and after making a few phone calls), I forward it to the IT security team to review and I delete it (all at once using my Phish Alert Button ).
With that said, I think anyone can determine the legitimacy of 95% or more of emails by following the simple steps above. Enjoy your threat hunting!
Cyber crime has become an arms race where the bad guys constantly evolve their attacks while you, the vigilant defender, must diligently expand your know how to prevent intrusions into your network.
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