According to new research by Comparitech.com, some websites have failed to fully secure their sign-up forms, which scammers are using as a gateway to smuggle malicious phishing links past email spam filters and into user inboxes.
At present, there’s no effective method users can employ to stop these emails from bypassing email spam filter. Although spam filters do check the email content for suspicious words, phrases, and links, one of the primary triggers is the email address itself. If the email address is coming from a whitelisted site or appears fully legitimate, it’s unlikely to be stopped by a spam filter even with a suspicious link in the content of the email.
Corin Imai, Senior Security Advisor at DomainTools:
“Unfortunately, traditional email filtering is effective only to a certain extent, leveraged to block out the obvious threats and do a great job at skimming out the bulk of known threats. With more sophisticated and recently discovered campaigns email filtering has becomes trickier. A good tool, in fact, can’t be too invasive or impair users’ experience: much like an authentication procedure cannot be too time consuming and affect the speed of operations, an email filtering system needs to find a balance between protecting from malicious messages and not creating an impediment to employees’ workflow.
This research presents precisely a case where a traditional email filtering system won’t be enough to protect an organisation from elaborate phishing scams, which is why the adoption of proactive security technologies should be considered.”
