Phishers count on remotely hosted images to bypass email filters

guest · Jan 16, 2021

Phishers count on remotely hosted images to bypass email filters
Loading remotely hosted images instead of embeedding them directly into emails is one of the latest tricks employed by phishers to bypass email filters.
January 15, 2021
https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2021/01/15/phishers-bypass-email-filters/

Images have also been used for ages as a way to circumvent an email’s textual content analysis but, as security technologies became more adept at extracting and analyzing content from images, phishers began trying out several tricks to make the process more difficult and time-consuming for security scanners.

“Unlike embedded images, which can be analyzed in real time by email filters, remote images are hosted on the web and thus need to be fetched before being analyzed,” Vade Secure researchers explained.
Click to expand...

At the moment, this new approach to delivering images in phishing emails is quite popular and obviously rather successful, but as email security vendors find ways to counter these tricks, cyber criminals will have to change tack once more – and so the arms race continues.
Click to expand...

Vade Security: Remote Images Are Pushing Email Filters to Their Limits

Phishing emails impersonating popular brands like Microsoft or PayPal need visual content to be successful. From brand logos to colorful pictures, images provide a visual cue to the recipient that the email is harmless and legitimate.

Analyzing a remote image requires fetching it over a network. Capitalizing on this weakness,
By using multiple redirections, the time to identify a phishing attack is prolonged.
Click to expand...

Log in or Sign up

Phishers count on remotely hosted images to bypass email filters

guest Guest

Log in or Sign up

Phishers count on remotely hosted images to bypass email filters

guest Guest

Useful Searches