SpartanTec, Inc. Fayetteville: Email Security Trends You Need To Watch Out For In 2021

Now is the time to predict the email security threats that can be expected in 2021. Here are some insights as provided by IT professionals.

Threat Hijacking Will Be On The Rise

Threat hijacking is threat to email security that will become more prominent in 2021. This technique involves using current email conversations with current victims so they can spread it to other victims. Cybercriminals will use various tools like Outlook Scraper to get email threats on computers that they have infected.

Threat hijacking is successful because the infected email will come from a reliable sender who doesn’t know that his email is infected, and the content of the mail can lower the guard of the targets. There will be an increase in the techniques utilized in Emotet campaigns.

Remote Image Based Threats Will Test The Limits of Email Securiy Filters

Cybercriminals will store their infected textural content in remote images. Unlike those that are imbedded in emails, remote image based threats need to be fetched over a network. It is a time consuming, complex, and cannot be performed real time.

Compromised Accounts Will Give Hackers New Opportunities

Threat hijacking focuses on compromised accounts during this year’s attacks, which were carried out through Emotet. But they can also be exploited through other means such as massive spam waves. This method can send as many as 300,000 spam emails. It allows hackers to bypass the email filters and without any post remediation capability, it is extremely difficult to block.

Business Email Compromise Will Be A Global Problem

The growth in BEC or Business Email Compromise as well as the difficulty in detecting this problem has resulted into new advancements in the content analysis through artificial intelligence. But most algorithms find it difficult to detect BEC especially when it is in a foreign language.

The BEC typologies will grow too. In the past, BEC scams focused on W2 harvesting, gift card scams, and CEO fraud. But other typologies will become more prominent such as banking fraud, lawyer, and payroll.

Vendor Impersonation

Users trust emails, links, or attachments sent through Microsoft as well as other Microsoft services. Even if the email look suspicious, people’s curiosity will push them to check the attachment. Because of that, they become more at risk to vendor impersonation.

Hackers Will Get Personal

Social tensions, elections, wildfires, and pandemic fatigue. These global events cause stress and anxiety, which take a toll on the citizens all over the globe. Hackers exploited this fact this year and they will continue in 2021. More cybercriminals will use psychological tricks on different subjects to leverage the emotional fragility of internet users.

Hackers are not the only people who see the value of the human behaviour when it comes to cybersecurity. Although people are thought of as the weakest link when it comes to email security, if a vendor isn’t capable of blocking the attempt, then people will be the final line of defence. That’s why vendors will focus more on human centric cybersecurity strategies in 2021.