Malicious email is, simply put, email with a malicious purpose. The malicious purpose could be fraud, theft, espionage, or malware injection. The processes by which email execute the malicious activity vary widely, from fully manual (e.g. human-directed) to fully automated. One example of a malicious email is one that contains an attachment which the recipient is directed to open. When the attachment is opened, malicious software is installed on the recipient's computer. Because malicious email can vary so broadly in form and function, automated detection is only marginally helpful. The education of all users to detect potential malicious email is important to containing the threat and limiting the damage. It is increasingly necessary for all email users to understand how to recognize and combat malicious email. Detecting and Combating Malicious Email describes the different types of malicious email, shows how to differentiate malicious email from benign email, and suggest protective strategies for both personal and enterprise email environments. - Discusses how and why malicious e-mail is used - Explains how to find hidden viruses in e-mails - Provides hands-on concrete steps to detect and stop malicious e-mail before it is too late - Covers what you need to do if a malicious e-mail slips through

Learn how to detect, analyze, and respond to phishing emails, the top infection vector used by cybercriminals. The repeatable process described in this book has been cultivated and tested in real-life incidents and validated across multiple threat landscapes and environments. Every organization and individual with an email account is susceptible to deceptive emails sent by attackers with nefarious intentions. This activity, known as phishing, involves an attacker attempting to lure individuals into providing sensitive information or performing a predetermined action. Attacks vary in sophistication, but the core skills and process to detect, analyze, and respond to a suspicious message does not change. Attackers have preyed on victims with convincing and not-so-convincing phishing emails to gain initial footholds into networks around the world for over 30 years. This attack method has been rapidly growing in popularity and continues to be the number one method that organizations and individuals struggle to defend against. Regardless of what any vendor or organization will tell you, no infallible tool exists to eliminate this threat completely. This book teaches you how to analyze suspicious messages using free tools and resources. You will understand the basics of email, tactics used by attackers, and a repeatable process to systematically analyze messages and respond to suspicious activity. You Will Learn How to: Safely save email messages as attachments for analysis Identify what information is in an email header Review header information and extract key indicators or patterns used for detection Identify signs of a suspicious or malicious email message Detect the tactics that attackers use in phishing emails Safely examine email links and attachments Use a variety of free and simple tools to analyze email messages.

An essential anti-phishing desk reference for anyone with an email address Phishing Dark Waters addresses the growing and continuing scourge of phishing emails, and provides actionable defensive techniques and tools to help you steer clear of malicious emails. Phishing is analyzed from the viewpoint of human decision-making and the impact of deliberate influence and manipulation on the recipient. With expert guidance, this book provides insight into the financial, corporate espionage, nation state, and identity theft goals of the attackers, and teaches you how to spot a spoofed e-mail or cloned website. Included are detailed examples of high profile breaches at Target, RSA, Coca Cola, and the AP, as well as an examination of sample scams including the Nigerian 419, financial themes, and post high-profile event attacks. Learn how to protect yourself and your organization using anti-phishing tools, and how to create your own phish to use as part of a security awareness program. Phishing is a social engineering technique through email that deceives users into taking an action that is not in their best interest, but usually with the goal of disclosing information or installing malware on the victim's computer. Phishing Dark Waters explains the phishing process and techniques, and the defenses available to keep scammers at bay. Learn what a phish is, and the deceptive ways they've been used Understand decision-making, and the sneaky ways phishers reel you in Recognize different types of phish, and know what to do when you catch one Use phishing as part of your security awareness program for heightened protection Attempts to deal with the growing number of phishing incidents include legislation, user training, public awareness, and technical security, but phishing still exploits the natural way humans respond to certain situations. Phishing Dark Waters is an indispensible guide to recognizing and blocking the phish, keeping you, your organization, and your finances safe.

There are an increasing number of emails purporting to be from a trusted entity that attempt to deceive users into providing account or identity information, commonly known as phishing emails. Traditional spam filters are not adequately detecting these undesirable emails, and this causes problems for both consumers and businesses wishing to do business online. From a learning perspective, this is a challenging problem. At first glance, the problem appears to be a simple text classification problem, but the classification is confounded by the fact that the class of phishing emails is nearly identical to the class of real emails. We propose a new method for detecting these malicious emails called PILFER. By incorporating features specifically designed to highlight the deceptive methods used to fool users, we are able to accurately classify over 92% of phishing emails, while maintaining a false positive rate on the order of 0.1%. These results are obtained on a dataset of approximately 860 phishing emails and 6950 non-phishing emails. The accuracy of PILFER on this dataset is significantly better than that of SpamAssassin, a widely-used spam filter.

Phishing is one of the most widely-perpetrated forms of cyber attack, used to gather sensitive information such as credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and user logins and passwords, as well as other information entered via a web site. The authors of A Machine-Learning Approach to Phishing Detetion and Defense have conducted research to demonstrate how a machine learning algorithm can be used as an effective and efficient tool in detecting phishing websites and designating them as information security threats. This methodology can prove useful to a wide variety of businesses and organizations who are seeking solutions to this long-standing threat. A Machine-Learning Approach to Phishing Detetion and Defense also provides information security researchers with a starting point for leveraging the machine algorithm approach as a solution to other information security threats. - Discover novel research into the uses of machine-learning principles and algorithms to detect and prevent phishing attacks - Help your business or organization avoid costly damage from phishing sources - Gain insight into machine-learning strategies for facing a variety of information security threats

"Phishing" is the hot new identity theft scam. An unsuspecting victim receives an e-mail that seems to come from a bank or other financial institution, and it contains a link to a Web site where s/he is asked to provide account details. The site looks legitimate, and 3 to 5 percent of people who receive the e-mail go on to surrender their information-to crooks. One e-mail monitoring organization reported 2.3 billion phishing messages in February 2004 alone. If that weren't enough, the crooks have expanded their operations to include malicious code that steals identity information without the computer user's knowledge. Thousands of computers are compromised each day, and phishing code is increasingly becoming part of the standard exploits. Written by a phishing security expert at a top financial institution, this unique book helps IT professionals respond to phishing incidents. After describing in detail what goes into phishing expeditions, the author provides step-by-step directions for discouraging attacks and responding to those that have already happened. In Phishing, Rachael Lininger: Offers case studies that reveal the technical ins and outs of impressive phishing attacks. Presents a step-by-step model for phishing prevention. Explains how intrusion detection systems can help prevent phishers from attaining their goal-identity theft. Delivers in-depth incident response techniques that can quickly shutdown phishing sites.