Symantec Report Finds Spear-Phishing Going Strong and People are Still the Weakest Link

Security company, Symantec released a report on attacks against financial institutions. It found many disturbing results, but the bottom line is that the end user “still remains the weakest link in the chain during an online transaction.”

What’s an organization to do? In a word, training. The report continues to suggest that institutions need to be open about the various risks and educate customers about the potential security issues that may come along at any given time.

The authors of the report stress that the classic methods of phishing and spear-phishing are going strong. The Carbanak Trojan is an example of how cyber criminals can take advantage of their targets through spear-phishing email messages. In that case, the net take was over $1 billion from banks worldwide. That operation lasted around two years before it was detected.

Many times, cyber criminals will gain entry to the network and just lay low for a while doing significant amounts of damage over time. In other cases, the criminals can use a variety of social engineering methods and end up with an entire database of information, such as was the case with JP Morgan last year. In that case, the hackers acquired login credentials of an employee and stole information on 83 million individuals and companies. That started with spear-phishing and ultimately that led to the breach JP Morgan network. While financial data reportedly was not accessed, names, addresses, and email addresses were. That information can be used for phishing and spear-phishing on a very large scale. That case is still being investigated.

So while various malware attacks are becoming more sophisticated, they are also being more specific with their targets. While the actual number of Trojans being detected is decreasing (down 73%), the dollar values that are stolen as a result of these more sophisticated attacks is increasing significantly. This could be because of better tools for detection, arrests of those creating and propagating the malware, or possibly because those doing the damage are being more creative, more specific with their targets, and going for the larger payoffs by using spear-phishing. In the case of the bad guys getting into a financial organization’s network, the results could be fraudulent wire transfers and transactions or even causing ATMs to dispense cash.

It is very important to train employees and customers the various types of security risks. Phishing and spear-phishing are likely here to stay. In fact, the data-stealing malware Dridex is sent out in millions of email messages every day. The report states that 214 more of them were sent in February than January of this year already. This Trojan possibly poses the biggest threat to financial sector security today.

And how does it spread? It’s through email phishing campaigns with the overall aim of stealing credentials of online banking users. Those can then be used to access bank accounts and cash reserves. A little bit of training can go a long way to prevent something like this.