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07
October

How to Protect Against Coronavirus Phishing Scams

October 7, 2020
In Company, Industry
By Mackenzie Parnham

Given the current state, holidays, and special cyber shopping sales, are no longer the only days to worry about email phishing scams.

As mentioned in our previous blog (you can catch up here), the pandemic has resulted in a major surge in coronavirus related cyber scams. Everything from government related scams, shmishing campaigns, and most commonly, email phishing attempts, are taking advantage of vulnerable people during a fearful time. Phishing scams aren’t new to most, however, the pandemic has brought out even more relentless cybercriminals and new tactics to trick those into clicking links and potentially giving up their credentials.   

Today we will focus on the coronavirus related phishing scams and how to differentiate a scam from a real email.

How to Protect Against COVID-19 Cyber Scams

As attacks become more challenging to identify, organizations become more susceptible to breach and ransomware infections are often instigated through phishing emails. It’s crucial to take proactive measures to help protect yourself and your organization’s security.

Coronavirus related phishing attempts are a current security attack trend with the ultimate goal of loading dangerous malware on an innocent individual’s computer. Cybercriminals send emails claiming to be from legitimate organizations, such as the World Health Organization or the CDC, with information about the coronavirus  The suspect email may ask you to download an attachment or click a link to review the latest statistics. You should know that if the link is clicked, or the attachment was downloaded, you have potentially loaded malicious software onto your device. This malware could allow cybercriminals to take full control of your computer, log your keystrokes, and even access your personal information and financial data.

A legitimate organization, such as the WHO, will likely never ask you to download an attachment you have not requested. They will never ask for your username/password or offer you money. If you receive an email including any of these items, you may be the target of a coronavirus phishing attack.

The best way to prevent the potentially damaging effects of phishing attacks is enforcing basic education – just like putting on your seat belt when driving a car. By now you’re probably pretty familiar with what the typical phishing email looks like, and what to watch out for, however here’s a quick reminder:

What to look for in a traditional phishing email:

  1. Verify that the email address is really an internal address and from a trusted source
  2. If your name is not in the to: or CC: line or many of your colleagues are listed (dozens or even hundreds), question the source
  3. If there are simple typos or grammatical mistakes, or the subject line seems odd, it could potentially be a fake
  4. Verify the links are for real domains and not questionable like .ru
phishing email
phishing_email
Source

Do’s and Don’ts When You Receive a Possible Phishing Email

  1. Don’t ever give out sensitive information such as your username/password, financial information, or address
  2. Don’t feel pressured to click the link or download an attachment because of a “deadline” outlined in the email
  3. Do your research – most organizations will issue a statement regarding phishing emails or scams coming from a source that appears to be them. Always check the website of the organization to verify
  4. Always report the scam to the organization in question and to your organization’s IT team
  5. If you mistakenly gave out sensitive information to a scammer, make sure to change all your passwords immediately

5 Best Practices to Mitigate the Risks of Phishing Attacks

Basic technology can stop an attack even if the end user makes a mistake since many of the phishing attacks leverage known weaknesses. Here are five best practices to mitigate the risks of phishing attacks:

  1. Make sure all security patches are up to date on a regular basis for all systems, especially for common attack vectors like Microsoft Office, Adobe Flash, and Java.
  2. Ensure the end-user is running with proper privileges and not logged in as an administrator answering emails. This just makes it easier for malware to own the system and bypass defences.
  3. Ensure defence software like AV is up to date including engine and signatures.
  4. Disable automatic macro execution in Office and only run macros that are digitally signed (the sample file discussed above).
  5. Deploy and maintain SPAM filters, next-generation firewalls, etc. to stop malicious emails before they end up in an end user’s inbox and establish command and control of the hijacked system.

Interested in learning more about how to improve your email security practices? We’re here to help. Contact a Secure Sense sales representative at sales@securesense.ca or 866-999-7506.

In honour of Cyber Security Awareness Month, we will be sharing insight on the latest cybersecurity news, tips from Secure Sense experts and general security knowledge geared towards keeping you out of the headlines and focused on what matters most, your business. Don’t miss a beat by following along on our Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn Pages.

Blog Sources:
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Secure Sense is the security provider that cares. We are a team of experts with a passion for IT and protecting your organization is what motivates us daily. If you have questions or want to learn more about how we can improve your organization’s security, our services or just want to chat security please give us a shout.

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A Secure Sense Competitive Advantage

Welcome back to the Cyber Security Month blog! In last week’s blog, we talked about the importance and value of an MSSP, what sets Secure Sense apart from other MSSP’s and how Secure Sense can help your business. Today, we want to continue the conversation around the competitive advantage of working with Secure Sense and what sets us apart in the world of managed security.

In addition to our dedicated customer success teams and our 24×7 SOC (read more in the previous blog here) Secure Sense’s white glove service stands out in many other ways. Continue reading to find out the secret keyphrase, and our competitive advantage.

Expert engineers/analysts

Our experienced technical team comes from diverse technical backgrounds, representing a wealth of security knowledge. They play an integral role in everything we do at Secure Sense; from evaluating partners to developing services, allowing us to focus entirely on the best products and the highest training certificates.

Our engineers, architects, and analysts are required to ensure they are up-to-date on technical training. In addition to solution technical training, our technical team has focused on training in the following areas:

  • Communication for clearer and more accurate ticket updates​
  • Troubleshooting skillsets have led to fewer escalations internally, and ultimately shorter times to remediate​
  • Critical analysis skills which have measurably improved our ticket responses in providing higher quality responses to tickets.

This training has had a measurable increase in the quality of our services, as well as time to remediate and reduce escalations.

Our SOC has many teams that work with our expert analysts to ensure you receive the most from your service. In addition to our security analyst team, Secure Sense has four other technical teams: the reporting team, the threat intel team, the automation team, and the purple team.​

Automation team:

The Secure Sense automation team reviews customer requests, as well as potential customer controls, and ties those controls in with our managed services for automated systems mitigation, stopping threats in their tracks.​

The team is also responsible for:

  • Automated SIEM log analysis, tied into our Threat intelligence team to streamline the ingestion of IOCs into our managed services.
  • Implementing our vendor vulnerability review and remediation systems allows us to reduce our critical vulnerability remediation windows and provide improved visibility into coverage and reporting.
  • Delivering smart-responses from our SIEM solution, and implementation of Reporting team recommendations and improvements.​
  • Automating reporting and alerting directly into our ServiceNOW portal, providing short response times to customer alerts

Reporting team:

Secure Sense has created a dedicated reporting team to streamline and bring more meaningful data to our customers on a regular basis. This team not only builds custom reports, but also analyzes how our customers are using our services, identifying any particular improvements that we could be making to the services, and providing recommendations to the rest of the managed service teams.​

Our reporting team also builds datasets and analyses based on our customer tickets, as well as managed service systems, to identify new use cases and patterns that we can leverage to improve services internally.​

Threat intel team:

Our internal Threat Intel team reviews various events that have occurred and identifies the relevant TTPs. They provide this intelligence to our purple team which will operationalize it.​

The Secure Sense threat intel team focuses on both systematic collection of IOCs and analysis thereof, as well as individual TTPs that are used to identify new and emerging threats. ​The team looks at those tools, Techniques and procedures that threats are using in the market, and identifies how they could be leveraged against our existing customer base, along with better enhancing our services to detect those TTPs when in use.​​

Purple team:​

Secure Sense’s Purple team reflects the blend of both defensive or blue team skillsets, along with offensive or red team skillsets. The team takes tools, techniques and procedures identified by the threat intel team, analyses our customer’s environments and identifies if we can detect them. ​ With customer collaboration, the Purple team can provide execution packages where we can simulate specific components of a threat, and then validate that we have visibility into that TTP being run in a customer environment.

Professional services

Secure Sense’s implementation and support experts are experienced in a wide variety of Professional Services engagements with specialized tactical teams within our extended technical bench, focused on specific technologies and or products.

In most cases, Professional Services are project-based services that require a skilled engineer or architect for a one-time project or short-term change in your organization; or a senior consultant to provide a wide range of risk advisory services. Project teams will also typically address any ongoing support or maintenance after the initial project is complete.

Our cybersecurity consultant team and senior architects hold a broad range of top industry certifications and credentials, along with many years of experience in the industry. Our methodologies for common engagement types have been developed and refined to reflect the most up-to-date best practices and to scale to projects of any size, including global enterprise enablement.

A few of the engagements we commonly offer include:

  • Cybersecurity Architecture Assessment and Design
  • Solution Implementation Services
  • Health Checks
  • Penetration Testing
  • Vulnerability Assessments
  • Threat and Risk Assessment
  • Enablement & Training
  • Ongoing Support

Secure Sense focuses on continual training and certification among our technical ranks in order to provide the most knowledgeable technical support.

Security training

Secure Sense offers security training and can assist in helping your organization to create its cyber security training program. From general employee awareness training to specific security training for your IT and security staff, Secure Sense can help your organization combat the threats they face on a daily basis. Our team is able to offer:

  • Engaging user awareness training for end-users
  • Technology training for security solutions and products
  • Security Analyst training
  • Threat hunting training
  • Threat simulations to give your internal security teams practice in using internal tools
  • Tabletop exercise development and execution to simulate incidents and incident response

Your Key word is “Purple Team”

Don’t forget! Take this keyword and head to our LinkedIn page here to comment on it for your chance to win one of many prizes this month!

As always, if you’re interested in learning more about Secure Sense’s competitive advantage or any of our services, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at 866-999-7506 or sales@securesense.ca!

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