Scammers can be pretty innovative when it comes to finding new ways to sneak phishing messages past secure email gateways and other filtering mechanisms.
One example is "text direction deception," a tactic where an attacker forces an HTML rendering engine to correctly display text that has been deliberately entered backward in the code — for example, getting text that exists in HTML code as "563 eciffO" to render forward correctly as "Office 365."
Security vendor Inky Technologies discovered the direction deception tactic being used in an email that was part of a phishing campaign. In a report this week, the company described the tactic as designed to trick security controls that filter email messages based on whether the emails contain text and text sequences that have been previously associated with phishing scams.
Such tactics could become more common as cybercriminals take advantage of the worldwide concern around the COVID-19 pandemic to fill email inboxes with phishing messages designed to trick users in various ways.
Just this week, for instance, Menlo Security reported what it described as a sophisticated, multistage phishing campaign targeted at stealing the credentials of specific individuals in the executive and finance teams at hundreds of companies.
The emails contained a phishing message that purported to be from the CEOs of each of the targeted companies. The emails also included an attachment that seemingly contained COVID-19 related employee information. The attachment contained a shortened link to a hosted form on a legitimate Microsoft service that prompted users for their login credentials.
With many email security products getting better at spotting scam emails, criminals have begun innovating as well. "To increase their success rate, at ..
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