Email attacks keep causing headaches for companies

22nd February 2018

F-Secure

Alice Matthews

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Datasheet

According to a new report published by F-Secure, over one-third of all security incidents start with phishing emails or malicious attachments sent to company employees. F-Secure’s new Incident Response Report summarises findings from F-Secure’s incident response investigations and provides insights into how real hackers attack organisations.

The single most common source of breaches analysed in the report was attackers exploiting vulnerabilities in an organisation’s internet facing services, which accounted for about 21% of security incidents investigated by F-Secure’s incident responders. But phishing and emails with malicious attachments together accounted for about 34% of breaches, which F-Secure Principal Security Consultant Tom Van de Wiele says make attacks arriving via email a much bigger pain point for organisations.

“Exploiting software vulnerabilities in drive-by scenarios is typical in opportunistic attacks, but breaching companies via email is actually far more common. There’s a lot of different ways different attackers can use email, and these attacks are popular because almost every company relies on email for communication,” Van de Wiele said. “People need to think before they click on attachments and links, but the pressures of many jobs overrides this logic, which attackers understand and exploit.”

Other significant findings in the report include:

Organisations were hit by targeted and opportunistic attacks in nearly equal proportion to one another
Insider threats accounted for one-fifth of security incidents
Incident responders were contacted after the security perimeter was breached in nearly 80% of cases
The most common post-breach action taken by attackers was spreading malware (mostly for financial gain, but also for espionage or maintaining access for future purposes)
Thirteen percent of investigations turned out to be false alarms

According to Van de Wiele, the number of false alarms reported as security incidents is surprising, and shows that too many organisations struggle with accurately detecting cyber attacks. “We’re often called in to investigate ‘suspicious activity,’ which tells me that a lot of organisations don’t have accurate incident detection capabilities. Sometimes we’ll even investigate and discover an IT problem rather than an attack, which drains resources and distracts everyone from dealing with the real issue.”

The report recommends companies improve their incident detection and response capabilities, such as by investing in an endpoint detection and response solution or service.