Countering Cyber Deception to Mitigate Risk

Emails are not limited to the virtual. For attack campaigns via collaborative platforms and email to be successful there usually needs to be the interaction between human and machine. This relies on an element of deception by the threat actor to lure the target to interact with the malicious entity contained within the communication, as a link, or as an attachment that takes them from the apparent safety of their internal environment to the external. This will often need to be launched through a user following an instruction in the communication, physically ‘clicking’ on the link, or opening an attachment. Research has identified1 that humans are the single biggest exploitable vulnerability within any network.