The New Target: Businesses
Flush with the success of defrauding consumers, fraudsters now are turning their sights on businesses. Leveraging social engineering to evade corporate security systems, fraudsters gain network access and steal confidential corporate data and financial assets. With the unwitting cooperation of an employee, every network defense is useless, including firewalls, IDS/IPS, and secure identification cards.
Phishing Is Not Spam
Because phishing e-mails are designed to look like legitimate business correspondence, they consistently elude spam filters. Phishing requires specific analysis, identification, and handling. And e-mail policies alone cannot be used to protect the organization. Here are the primary differences between spam and phishing e-mail:
How does it arrive?
- Spam: Sneaks in the back door
- Phishing: Walks in the front door
How does it make its offer?
- Spam: Looks bad, seems far-fetched
- Phishing: Looks plausible, seems credible
What is it trying to do?
- Spam: Tries to sell you something
- Phishing: Tries to steal something from you
A Unique Solution for a Unique Threat
The only solution that uniquely identifies e-mail phishing, SonicWALL not only captures phishing, but provides complete protection through our revolutionary evidence evaluation system that includes fraudulent e-mail header, content, and contact point analysis. The three points of SonicWALL Anti-Phishing are:
1 Headers
SonicWALL Anti-Phishing protection includes header analysis with Sender ID and evaluation by the SonicWALL GRID Network™, which uses SonicWALL’s industry leading reputation database of over 100 million GRIDprints to validate the reputation of an e-mail's sending IP address as well as its URLs, content, attachments, images, structure and more.
2 Content
Leveraging SonicWALL’s expertise and success with Adversarial Bayesian™ for anti-spam, SonicWALL Anti-Phishing incorporates its unique and patented Bayesian Fraud™ analysis into its content analysis. Developed from an extensive database of phishing and fraud samples collected from the SonicWALL GRID Network and vetted by SonicWALL Research, Bayesian Fraud content analysis differentiates and isolates phishing fraud from spam during the filtering process.
3 Contact Points
Spearheaded by SonicWALL Research, SonicWALL is the industry leader in contact point analysis. SonicWALL Anti-Phishing offers three levels of contact point review:
- Browser Exploit Detection: SonicWALL analyzes e-mails for items such as obfuscated URLs, port-number inconsistencies, redirections, and encoding that exploit vulnerabilities in browsers and operating systems.
- Social Engineering Trick Checks: Techniques, such as Divergence Detection™, which examines the difference between the appearance of a link and the actual result of acting on that link, are used by SonicWALL to search for tricks common in phishing fraud e-mails, but not in legitimate ones.
- Real-Time Phishing List™: SonicWALL cross-checks all contact points against its Real-Time Phishing List™, the industry's most extensive list of known phishing links.
Protecting Users from Themselves
SonicWALL takes phishing e-mail and marks it as phishing e-mail, while nearly everyone else marks these same messages as spam. SonicWALL research has shown that if a phishing e-mail is placed in the same folder as a users spam e-mail, the user will move the phishing e-mail to their “inbox” about 10% of the time – even though the e-mail was indeed a phishing e-mail. The same research showed that of you mark a phishing e-mail as a phish and place it in a different folder, marked “phish”, then users will move the phishing e-mail to their inbox less and 0.5% of the time. The phish designation warns the user of the danger of the e-mail and changes their behavior. This minimizes the potential loss of personal, financial, and even corporate information to phishers.
More Options
SonicWALL also offers anti-phishing options that align with other corporate security processes:
- Directory Harvest Attack protection can be used to thwart fraudsters
- Alerts about new types of emerging fraud attacks can be sent to specified e-mail addresses or to all users, keeping the company informed of phishing threats and helping to increase awareness and caution.
- Copies of all fraudulent e-mails sent to the company can be forwarded to specified e-mail addresses showing the phishing threats that have been averted.
Reporting
Finally, SonicWALL offers distinct phishing reporting, along with alert and feedback tools, so that administrators can be kept aware of trends, make necessary security modifications, and report those findings back to other entities that are part of your security network.
