Businesses in EMEA are being urged to remain vigilant as phishing attacks ramp up during the winter months.

F5 Labs, in collaboration with Webroot, has launched its second annual Phishing and Fraud report, highlighting an anticipated threat surge from October until January.

According the report, fraud incidents in October, November, and December tend to jump over 50% compared to the annual average.

Indicative of the scale of the problem, 75,6% of all websites taken offline by the F5 SOC platform between January 2014 and the end of 2017 were related to phishing attacks. This is followed by malicious scripts (11.3%) and URL redirects (5.2%), which are also used in conjunction with phishing operations. Mobile phishing (2%) was also identified as a growing issue.

“We’re in the middle of a cyber-crimewave where phishers and fraudsters take advantage of people at their most distracted,” said David Warburton, Senior EMEA Threat Research Evangelist, F5 Networks.

“It is prime season for individuals giving up credentials or inadvertently installing malware. Businesses are wrapping up end-of-year activities, key staff are on vacation, and record numbers of online holiday shoppers are searching for the best deals, looking for last-minute credit or feeling generous when charities come calling.”

Although phishing targets vary based on the nature of the scam, a remarkable 71% of attackers’ efforts from 1 September to 31 October 2018 focused on impersonating just ten organisations.

Technology companies were most mimicked (70% of incidents), with 58% of phishers’ time spent posing as big hitters like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, Adobe, Dropbox, and DocuSign during the monitored period.

The finance sector was also under fire. 13 of the top 20 fastest growing targets were financial organisations. Banks accounted for 55% of these, five of which were major European entities.

Notably, some of the most successful malware programs started out as banking malware. For example, Trickbot, Zeus, Dyre, Neverquest, Gozi, GozNym, Dridex, and Gootkit are all banking trojans known to have spread initially through phishing campaigns.

The Phishing and Fraud report stresses that the best first line of defence is a consistent education programme and creating a culture of curiosity. Tests by Webroot show that security awareness training can have a particularly ameliorative effect.

Companies that ran 11 or more training campaigns reduced employee phishing click-through rates to 13%. Six to ten sessions saw a 28% click-through rate, rising to 33% with one to five employee engagements.

In addition to awareness-raising, F5 Labs stresses the importance of organisations implementing access control protections, including multi-factor authentication and credential stuffing controls, to prevent phished credentials becoming a breach. Other report recommendations include the following defensive tactics:

• Email labeling. Clearly label all mail from external sources to prevent spoofing. A simple, specially formatted message can alert users to be on guard.
• Anti-virus (AV) software. AV software is a critical tool to implement on every system a user has access to. In most cases, up-to-date AV software will stop the malware installation attempt. Set your AV policy to update daily at a minimum.
• Web Filtering. A web filtering solution helps block access to phishing sites. Not only will this prevent a breach (providing the phishing site is known by your web filter provider), but it presents a valuable teaching opportunity by displaying an error message to the user
• Traffic decryption and inspection. F5 Labs analysed malware domains from Webroot that were active in September and October 2018. 68% of them were phoning-home over port 443, which is the standard TCP port used for websites encrypting communications over SSL/TLS. If organisations do not decrypt traffic beforeinspection, the malware installed through phishing attacks will go undetected inside the network.
• Single-Sign On (SSO). The fewer credentials users manage, the less likely they are to share them across multiple applications, create weak passwords, and store them insecurely. 
• Report phishing. Provide a means for employees to easily report suspected phishing. Some mail clients now have a built-in phish alert button to notify IT of suspicious activity. If your email client doesn’t have this feature, instruct all users to call the helpdesk or security team.
• Change email addresses. Consider changing the email addresses of commonly targeted employees if they are receiving an unusually high number of phishing attacks on a continual basis.
• Use CAPTCHAs. Use challenge-response technologies like CAPTCHA to distinguish humans from bots. However, users can find them annoying so use in cases where it’s highly likely a script is coming from a bot.
• Access control reviews. Review access rights of employees regularly, especially those with access to critical systems. These employees should also be prioritised for phishing training.
• Look out for newly-registered domain names. Phishing sites are often newly registered domains. When F5 reviewed the list of active malware and phishing domains collected by Webroot in September, only 62% were still active a week later.
• Implement web fraud detection. Implement a web fraud solution that detects clients infected with malware. This stops cybercriminals logging into your systems and allowing fraudulent transactions to occur.

“Phishing is a big problem and we expect attacks to continue because they are so effective, especially during the winter period” added Warburton.

“As organisations get better at web application security, it will be easier for fraudsters to phish people than to find web exploits. Ultimately, there is no one-stop-shop security control for phishing and fraud. A comprehensive control framework that includes people, process, and technology is a critical requirement to reduce the risk of an attack becoming a major incident.”