07/23/2020

Barracuda research uncovers a specialized economy emerging around email account takeover

PR Newswire

Highlights: 

• Attackers have created a specialized economy using brand impersonation, social engineering, and spear phishing to hijack email accounts and monetize them.
• In more than one-third of compromised accounts, attackers retain access for more than one week.
• Credential reuse across employees' personal and organization accounts is being exploited to compromise accounts successfully.

Barracuda, a trusted partner and leading provider of cloud-enabled security solutions, today released key findings about the ways cybercriminals are attacking and exploiting email accounts. The report, titled Spear Phishing: Top Threats and Trends Vol. 4 - Insights into attacker activity in compromised email accounts, reveals a specialized economy emerging around email account takeover and takes an in-depth look at the threats organizations face and the types of defense strategies you need to have in place.

Read the full report: https://www.barracuda.com/spear-phishing-report-4   

Over the past year, Barracuda researchers teamed up with leading researchers at UC Berkeley to study the end-to-end lifecycle of a compromised account. Examining 159 compromised accounts that span 111 organizations, they looked at how the account takeover happens, how long attackers have access to the compromised account, and how attackers use and extract information from these accounts.

Read more...