With COVID-19 Themed Campaigns on the Rise, Here’s How to Manage Email Phishing Risks

There are viruses, and then there are
viruses
. COVID-19 has rapidly taken over the headlines,
with countries, organizations and individuals scrambling to contain
the virus and maintain some level of normalcy in daily life. Borders
are closed, international travel is at a standstill, and most major
employers are having their workforces work remotely. Remote work
introduces many business continuity and disaster recovery challenges.
From a cyber perspective, organizations need to be on the lookout for
two escalating risks brought about by this evolving event. First, the
large increase of phishing and social engineering campaigns that use
public fear to enhance their effectiveness; and second, the increased
risks due to users working from home en masse
.

When it comes to risks related to social engineering and phishing,
attacks leveraging COVID-19 represent a heightened risk of cyber
attack to organizations worldwide, regardless of industry. As early as
February 2020, and with increased frequency since then, FireEye Mandiant
Threat Intelligence
has observed threat
actors aligning with the COVID-19 topic for their campaigns
—for
financial crime, cyber espionage and information operations purposes.

Private sector organizations are coming under increasing attack by
financially motivated threat actors seeking to exploit their sense of
urgency, fear, goodwill and mistrust. These attackers use email to
deliver malware in an effort to establish a foothold into the
corporate network or siphon account credentials through phishing tactics.

The following is an example of a COVID-19 phishing email used by
TEMP.Warlock threat group.

Email is a primary attack vector, and organizations must continue to
focus on both building user security awareness and hardening their
technical mitigative and detective controls. To enhance user
awareness, organizations should communicate the risks posed by
COVID-19 phishing and social engineering campaigns, providing users
examples of what to watch out for and what to do if they come across
such emails. Security leadership should take this opportunity to
reiterate security awareness guidance, reminding users to remain
vigilant to both phishing emails and potential payment fraud
scenarios. Both SANS
and US-CERT
provide relevant guidance for increasing user awareness, which can be
quickly adopted.

Beyond security awareness and training, organizations should
additionally take this time to perform a review of existing email and
other relevant security controls in order to reduce the likelihood and
impact of a successful phishing attack. Email-specific controls that
organizations should consider implementing in the short term include,
but are not limited to:

Enforce Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) 

The importance of MFA cannot be stressed enough. Passwords alone are
simply not enough to mitigate the risk of an account compromise, as
users commonly reuse their credentials across services or use weak
default passwords that are easily guessed by threat actors. At the
very least, organizations should enforce MFA for all external access
to critical assets and email services, especially from untrusted devices.

To ensure a smooth implementation of MFA, organizations should
implement a consistent solution used across all services, with an
enrollment process that is straight forward. The MFA implementation
should rely on more secure options such as authenticator applications
instead of SMS. It is important to enable the ability for users to
report MFA fraudulent requests, and to educate users on not accepting
MFA requests that they did not initiate.

Furthermore, organizations that enable MFA for email services such
as Microsoft Office 365 must block
legacy authentication
. Legacy protocols do not support MFA, and
as such, threat actors will commonly attempt to authenticate using
legacy authentication to circumvent MFA and other security controls.
At a minimum, legacy authentication should be blocked outside of the
corporate network.

Configure Spoof Protection Controls 

Ensure spoofing controls such as Sender Policy Framework (SPF),
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance
(DMARC), and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) are fully configured
for mail-enabled domains with hard fail and reject policies, where applicable.

Validate Email Security Gateway Implementation

Ensure email security gateways are fully deployed with all advanced
security capabilities. The solution should scan and block both
malicious attachments and embedded URLs. In a best-case scenario, the
solution should be utilizing a sandbox analysis approach, rather than
purely signature based. At a minimum, organizations should ensure that
certain file attachment types are blocked from emails (e.g., .scr,
.exe, .chm, etc.).

Implement Automated Email Warning Reminders

Implement mail flow rules that automatically embed an “External
Email” disclaimer to each email received from an external source. The
disclaimer should be used to remind users not to click on any embedded
links or attachments if the sender is unknown or the email is
unexpected. The following is a sample of a mail flow rule that embeds
an email header to warn users of the risks posed by external emails.

Formalize Phishing Reporting Process

It is important that organizations create a clear, simple and
repeatable process for their users to report phishing or suspicious
emails. By having this process in place, security teams are more
likely to become aware of phishing campaigns and immediately
investigate and contain any systems or accounts that may have been
compromised as a result of users falling victim to such campaigns.
Organizations should look to implement phishing reporting add-ons in
their user’s email clients that auto-attach a suspicious email and
forward it to the appropriate security team for further investigation.

Block Macros in Microsoft Office Documents

Embedded malicious macros in Microsoft Office documents continue to
be a common vector used by threat actors to compromise systems. These
macro-based Office documents are often attached to phishing emails or
downloaded from URLs embedded within phishing emails. Organizations
should consider implementing Active Directory group policy settings to
Block
macros from running in Office files from the Internet
”.

Validate Web Proxy or URL Filtering Configurations

User internet traffic should traverse a web proxy or URL filtering
solution. In a best-case scenario, Internet traffic should traverse
this solution whether on the corporate network or off of it (i.e.,
achieved using a cloud solution). Organizations should consider
blocking risky websites (e.g., detected as a threat or uncategorized)
or website categories that are not relevant to the business. At a
minimum, users should receive a warning page when accessing
potentially risky websites. Furthermore, all files downloaded from
external websites should be immediately analyzed for potential threats
through the use of real-time scanning and sandboxing technology.

Implement Strong Password Policies

FireEye Mandiant has historically observed threat actors conducting
password spraying attacks. Threat actors are successful in
compromising accounts due to weak password policies, allowing for the
use of the “SeasonYear”, and similar variations. It is strongly
recommended that organizations revise existing password policies and
implement technical controls to prevent the use of weak passwords,
especially for externally facing services. For organizations who have
implemented Azure AD, the Azure
AD Password Protection
feature could potentially help achieve
this level of security.

With the large number of employees transitioning to remote work as a
result of the ongoing pandemic, it is likely that there will be an
increase in Help Desk support calls for password resets, MFA
challenges and other issues, and it will be important that Help Desk
personnel have a defined methodology for verifying employee
identification to reduce the risk of successful social engineering
attempts. For example, requesting the name of the user’s manager is
not a sufficient “challenge” for identity verification.

Ensure Sufficient Logging and Alerting is in Place

Organizations should ensure that all available logs within email
services are enabled and, where possible, being forwarded to a central
logging platform—and retained for an appropriate period of time. If
the email service includes built-in threat detection alerting, it is
recommended these features are enabled and that alerts are either sent
through the logging pipeline to a centralized dashboard, or sent to
the security team’s email distribution list (DL) for immediate investigation.

Develop and Operationalize Phishing Incident Response Playbooks

It is essential to have a consistent and comprehensive process for
how to fully scope a potential phishing incident to ensure that any
subsequent security incident is immediately contained (e.g.,
successful compromise of an account or system). This can be achieved
through the development and operationalization of an incident response
Playbook, and should include, at a minimum, the following topics:

  • How to review a potential phishing email
  • How to
    securely analyze any malicious attachments or embedded URLs
  • How to identify all users who have received the phishing email
    or other variations of the email (i.e., threat actors may use
    variations of subject lines or sender email accounts to circumvent
    common phishing email scoping techniques)
  • How to validate
    which users fell victim to the phishing email, including which users
    accessed embedded URLs, or downloaded and executed attachments
  • How to immediately contain and fully investigate systems and
    accounts that may have been compromised as a result of the phishing
    incident

Implementing and enforcing these controls is a starting point for
organizations looking to quickly address the most common phishing
related risks. While organizations will need to regularly reevaluate
these controls to proactively adapt to the ever-changing threat
landscape, a robust security awareness program remains a key defensive
tactic in protecting against email-based phishing threats.