Lately, our sales teams have found a message that's resonating within the business community: IT administrators are looking for more proactive ways to identify and evaluate threats within their company's email data.
They want to be able to extend their tools into the email data network in search of malicious links.
URL hunting tools can search through email data and gather intelligence about potentially malicious links, giving IT teams the information they need in order to mitigate active threats in a more precise and immediate manner.
A sophisticated URL hunting tool is able to identify every link that's been clicked on in a network.
URL hunting, sometimes also known as threat hunting, is the proactive practice of searching for and investigating potentially malicious links that reside on an email server, which typically enter the network via phishing attempt or malware-infected message.
This process can pinpoint compromising emails that were stealthy enough to circumvent an organization's passive cybersecurity filters.
No solution is 100 percent perfect, but traditional SEG-based solutions often rely on the whitelisting and blacklisting of known dangerous IP addresses, and therefore are less effective against advanced, AI-generated phishing attempts, where the convincing message itself is what deceives victims into clicking ill-intentioned links.
These URLs often direct to a clever impostor site that spoofs a recognizable vendor or financial institution, requesting log-in and password information.
Links can also lead victims to supply credentials for their email accounts, resulting in those accounts being hacked.
Cybercriminals often target high-level executives for this activity, since they can use an authoritative email account to demand wire transfers, access financial accounts, or gather personal identifying information about additional employees.
This is referred to as BEC or Business Email Compromise, and its prevalence is escalating in the workplace.
Only a limited amount of cybersecurity solutions incorporate URL hunting, which functions like a search engine that can root out dangerous material.
IT administrators can proactively use these tools as a complementary strategy, or can reactively apply the tool when a known threat is suspected of being triggered on a business network.
If an employee has fallen victim to a phishing scheme on his home computer, the IT team can check whether that same malicious URL has been visited on his office email server, and if others on the network have received and clicked on the perpetrating link.
Or, if administrators get wind of certain link-based malware that is rearing its head in a particular industry, they can identify what users on their own system have visited the offending URL. How Analytics Can Inform Remediation.
Not only does a URL hunting tool enhance the administrator's ability to discover this harmful activity, it can also provide administrators with intelligence to help determine the scope and details of the attack, such as the IP address where the impostor page is being hosted.
A sophisticated URL hunting mechanism can perform advanced automated functions, such as presenting the email content to the administrator for examination, blacklisting both the link and the sender's IP addresses for the future, and/or eradicating the message from the recipient's inbox.
Rather than waiting for screens and filters to catch questionable material, a URL hunting strategy proactively gives an IT team the insights necessary to identify a threat, assess damage, and take appropriate action to mitigate risks.
When used in a multi-layered security stack, URL hunting allows a company to better thwart the damage done by unauthorized access or email account compromise.
Zack provides leadership to Trustifi's sales, operations and marketing teams, and works closely with MSPs to ensure their email cybersecurity initiatives are well-implemented and supported.
This Cyber News was published on www.cyberdefensemagazine.com. Publication date: Mon, 01 Jan 2024 06:13:03 +0000