The message you received looks legitimate. It uses your CEO’s usual sign-off and refers to a real customer. There are, however, a few unusual details. First of all, it asks you to change the bank account for a payment that is already scheduled. It also arrived just as the finance team was closing the books for the month.
Until recently, phishing messages were often easily identified by their awkward wording. Today, however, attackers are using generative AI to produce polished, convincing messages in seconds. Those messages, which appear to come from managers or executives, might even borrow the typical writing style of the alleged sender.
How, then, can you effectively defend your organization from these more convincing phishing messages? The solution involves a combination of technology and process.
In the past, phishing messages contained some fairly obvious warning signs, like generic greetings or misspelled words. Those types of clues are far less common today. Instead, today’s attackers might successfully mimic the way an executive communicates and avoid any clear errors. The only clue might be an urgent or unusual request.
Even suspicious attachments (malware hidden in a .zip file) and odd links (sending the message recipient to a fake web site) are less likely to be part of the scheme. Attackers might instead try to persuade an employee to share credentials, approve a payment, or disclose sensitive customer information.
These changes in tactics necessitate changes in security. Instead of scanning systems for suspicious files, security teams and the solutions they use must look for patterns of behavior and attempt to identify requests that depart from normal business practices.
Evolving tactics also require security teams to protect more than their employees’ email inboxes. Attackers know that employees regularly use chat and other collaboration tools to communicate and complete projects. Consequently, they are infiltrating those tools as well as email systems. If they can gain access to a chat tool, which employees believe is well secured, attackers might have a better chance to fool an employee into conducting an urgent task.
Many legacy anti-phishing solutions have never expanded beyond email, though. They may not provide the same visibility into internal messages or collaboration activity as they do for email systems. Organizations might need to replace those narrowly focused tools with more comprehensive ones so they can safeguard all the places where employees provide instructions and share sensitive information.
As attackers get better at impersonating colleagues and executives, it’s becoming extremely difficult for employees to identify phishing attempts based on the message content alone. A more effective strategy for spotting fraudulent messages is to focus on the request within the message.
Organizations should implement processes that will help employees independently confirm the validity of requests for high-risk actions. For example, a request to change payment methods, share confidential files, or approve an unexpected sign-in should require verification through a known phone number or established internal channel.
The verification requirement should apply to everyone, including executives. Employees should know that a financial control applies even if a request appears to come from the CEO.
Modern email security solutions extend beyond email systems alone, helping to protect a wider range of collaboration tools. These solutions also use advanced techniques to identify phishing, including behavioral signals, threat intelligence, and AI-assisted analysis.
Still, these solutions will not solve the phishing problem on their own. Organizations need people to tune policies and respond to alerts. Those people should have the expertise to continuously optimize defense tactics.
Regular employee security training is essential. But an organization can also benefit from periodically testing internal processes for stopping attacks. For example, an organization’s security team might send finance team members emails that impersonate the CEO, asking them to take certain urgent actions. If the organization has verification processes in place, the security team can evaluate how well employees are following those practices and whether they work.
No security solution alone can detect the true intent behind every business request. The strongest strategies for combating phishing combine managed technical controls with clear human-led processes. Employees should know which requests require a second approval and which colleagues they should call when they’re unsure how to respond.
NexusTek AI Email Security combines protection for email and collaboration tools together with monitoring and support from its Security Operations Center (SOC). The operations team investigates suspicious messages and activity, tunes policies, and conducts regular reporting. Adding that expertise to a technology solution helps organizations look beyond the email inbox and treat human deception as an ongoing operational risk.
The next phishing message might look completely legitimate. Supplementing a technology solution with a verification process and a monitored security environment makes it much more difficult for attackers to succeed.
Learn how NexusTek AI Email Security helps protect modern email and collaboration workflows: https://www.nexustek.com/ai-email-security-managed-solutions