Using AI to fight hand-crafted Business Email Compromise (BEC)

guest · Aug 23, 2020

Using AI to fight hand-crafted Business Email Compromise
August 21, 2020
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/20...fight-hand-crafted-business-email-compromise/

Business Email Compromise (BEC), is a form of targeted phishing where attackers disguise themselves as senior executives to dupe employees into doing something they absolutely shouldn’t, like wire money.
The challenge of detection
BEC emails can be difficult to detect using security solutions because no malware is involved. There are no embedded links to questionable URLs or booby-trapped attachments. They often abuse the company’s own email addresses.

Detecting hand crafted BEC emails is even harder because each one is unique, and skilled attackers can be very good at mimicking the style and tone of their targets.
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Introducing CATBERT
We started by adapting a deep learning model developed by Google and used in natural language processing (NLP).
The model we used is called BERT (for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). BERT has shown impressive results in NLP tasks like story comprehension and identifying emotions.

The cybersecurity ready model needed some important additional capability.
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First, it had to be as light (fast) as possible for real-time predictions and response.
Second, it needed to be able to capture the valuable clues hiding in the email’s context information, such as sender and header details.
We called our model Context-Aware Tiny BERT, or CATBERT.

Last but not least, CATBERT was also able to pick up on subtleties in terms of email topic, tone and style, which allowed it to accurately detect new, targeted phishing attacks.
Overall, CATBERT achieved an 82% and 90% detection rate on phishing and BEC attacks respectively, with a 0.1% false positive rate.
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Sophos AI: CATBERT — Detecting malicious emails with a bleeding-edge neural language model

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Using AI to fight hand-crafted Business Email Compromise (BEC)

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