WEBINAR | A Deep-Dive into 2023 Cyber Threats
Reduce Alert Noise and False Positives
Boost your team's productivity by cutting down alert noise and false positives.
Automate Security Operations
Boost efficiency, reduce burnout, and better manage risk through automation.
Dark Web Monitoring
Online protection tuned to the need of your business.
Maximize Existing Security Investments
Improve efficiencies from existing investments in security tools.
Beyond MDR
Move your security operations beyond the limitations of MDR.
Secure with Microsoft 365 E5
Boost the power of Microsoft 365 E5 security.
Secure Multi-Cloud Environments
Improve cloud security and overcome complexity across multi-cloud environments.
Secure Mergers and Acquisitions
Control cyber risk for business acquisitions and dispersed business units.
Operational Technology
Solve security operations challenges affecting critical operational technology (OT) infrastructure.
Force-Multiply Your Security Operations
Whether you’re just starting your security journey, need to up your game, or you’re not happy with an existing service, we can help you to achieve your security goals.
Detection Investigation Response
Modernize Detection, Investigation, Response with a Security Operations Platform.
Threat Hunting
Locate and eliminate lurking threats with ReliaQuest GreyMatter
Threat Intelligence
Find cyber threats that have evaded your defenses.
Model Index
Security metrics to manage and improve security operations.
Breach and Attack Simulation
GreyMatter Verify is ReliaQuest’s automated breach and attack simulation capability.
Digital Risk Protection
Continuous monitoring of open, deep, and dark web sources to identify threats.
Phishing Analyzer
GreyMatter Phishing Analyzer removes the abuse mailbox management by automating the DIR process for you.
Integration Partners
The GreyMatter cloud-native Open XDR platform integrates with a fast-growing number of market-leading technologies.
Unify and Optimize Your Security Operations
ReliaQuest GreyMatter is a security operations platform built on an open XDR architecture and designed to help security teams increase visibility, reduce complexity, and manage risk across their security tools, including on-premises, clouds, networks, and endpoints.
Blog
Company Blog
Case Studies
Brands of the world trust ReliaQuest to achieve their security goals.
Data Sheets
Learn how to achieve your security outcomes faster with ReliaQuest GreyMatter.
eBooks
The latest security trends and perspectives to help inform your security operations.
Industry Guides and Reports
The latest security research and industry reports.
Podcasts
Catch up on the latest cybersecurity podcasts, and mindset moments from our very own mental performance coaches.
Solution Briefs
A deep dive on how ReliaQuest GreyMatter addresses security challenges.
White Papers
The latest white papers focused on security operations strategy, technology & insight.
Videos
Current and future SOC trends presented by our security experts.
Events & Webinars
Explore all upcoming company events, in-person and on-demand webinars
ReliaQuest ResourceCenter
From prevention techniques to emerging security trends, our comprehensive library can arm you with the tools you need to improve your security posture.
Threat Research
Get the latest threat analysis from the ReliaQuest Threat Research Team. ReliaQuest ShadowTalk Weekly podcast featuring discussions on the latest cybersecurity news and threat research.
Shadow Talk
ReliaQuest's ShadowTalk is a weekly podcast featuring discussions on the latest cybersecurity news and threat research. ShadowTalk's hosts come from threat intelligence, threat hunting, security research, and leadership backgrounds providing practical perspectives on the week's top cybersecurity stories.
April 18, 2024
About ReliaQuest
We bring our best attitude, energy and effort to everything we do, every day, to make security possible.
Leadership
Security is a team sport.
No Show Dogs Podcast
Mental Performance Coaches Derin McMains and Dr. Nicole Detling interview world-class performers across multiple industries.
Make It Possible
Make It Possible reflects our focus on bringing cybersecurity awareness to our communities and enabling the next generation of cybersecurity professionals.
Careers
Join our world-class team.
Press and Media Coverage
ReliaQuest newsroom covering the latest press release and media coverage.
Become a Channel Partner
When you partner with ReliaQuest, you help deliver world-class cybersecurity solutions.
Contact Us
How can we help you?
A Mindset Like No Other in the Industry
Many companies tout their cultures; at ReliaQuest, we share a mindset. We focus on four values every day to make security possible: being accountable, helpful, adaptable, and focused. These values drive development of our platform, relationships with our customers and partners, and further the ReliaQuest promise of security confidence across our customers and our own teams.
More results...
Phishing is one of the most scalable and successful attack techniques used by threat actors. According to Retruster, phishing accounted for 90% of data breaches in 2019 and the prevalence of phishing attacks is growing by 65% annually. Now, phishing has become an increasingly bigger threat due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This blog covers detection and investigation techniques security teams can use to maintain visibility into phishing threats.
The first step in detecting phishing threats is ensuring that the proper tools and monitoring are in place. E-mail security solutions like Proofpoint, Cisco IronPort, or Microsoft Advanced Threat Protection provide alerting based on reputation and content inspection, but more granular monitoring of certain behaviors like those listed below can further enhance an organizations ability to detect phishing incidents.
Once a threat actor compromises a mailbox, a common action is to start a social engineering campaign with other e-mail contacts to gain sensitive information or redirect cash-flows to compromised bank accounts. A crucial step in these campaigns is evasion and hiding the e-mail chains the threat actor generates. Evasion can be done by creating e-mail rules to redirect inbound and outbound emails associated with the threat actor’s correspondence to the “RSS Feeds” folder in Outlook. This folder is created by default and seldom used legitimately. As such, it creates the perfect place to hide e-mails sent or received by the threat actor instead of the legitimate user. Monitoring for any mail rules mentioning RSS Feeds can help detect compromised mailboxes being actively leveraged by a threat actor.
Another e-mail data exfiltration method used by threat actors is to create an Outlook redirect policy that forwards all inbound or outbound mail to an external email address. Once this has been implemented, the threat actor will have a copy of all email correspondence involving the compromised account, even if the password is reset and the threat actor loses access. Monitoring and auditing Office 365 management logs for mail redirect policies created that have a recipient domain not associated with your organization can reveal data exfiltration from a compromised e-mail account.
A range of e-mail services provide temporary, disposable, e-mail addresses which can be used by a threat actor as an anonymous recipient of sensitive company documents being ex-filtrated from a company email. Generating a list of throw-away domains and monitoring for any emails destined to an address registered with a throw-away domain can provide insight into potential data exfiltration.
When a security team is notified of a probable phishing incident, the next step is determining the scope and severity of the incident so that the threat can be properly contained and remediated. We’ve highlighted some key investigation steps to determine the scope and severity of phishing threats to determine what next action to take and remediate from the environment.
Whether an alert is received from an e-mail security tool, or the original e-mail is reported internally from the end-user, the first step is to investigate the URL included within the e-mail. The most effective method of investigating a URL is using a sandbox tool like Any.Run or URL Scan. Both tools offer free versions and allow you to safely investigate the potentially malicious link. Any.Run allows you to interact with the web page in real-time so you can see what happens if a user fills out the fake login page or downloads the malicious file. Indicators to look out for include content and domain mismatches. If the webpage is a mirror image of a Microsoft login page, but the domain is un-related to Microsoft and isn’t owned by Microsoft – this would indicate a true positive phishing threat.
Once the URL has been investigated to confirm a malicious disposition, the next investigation step is to determine whether the end-user filled out and submitted their credentials. Looking within web proxy event logs for HTTP POST requests from the user who received the phishing e-mail around the incident time frame would indicate that the account is now compromised. To evade detection, threat actors may use multiple HTTP redirects, so any POST requests regardless of if the domain is a direct match to the original email URL should be considered an indication of compromise.
If the user is suspected to have their respective credentials compromised, the next step is to determine if the threat actor has accessed the account yet. Leveraging the visibility from Single Sign-On solutions or e-mail authentication logs, you can generate a list of IP addresses an account has authenticated from. Any logins from IP addresses that have an anomalous geo-location, have a poor reputation across tools, or are owned by VPN providers like Private Internet Access may indicate that a threat actor compromised the account credentials and accessed the account.
Phishing attacks will not be going away any time soon, so it’s continually important to detect, investigate, and mitigate phishing incidents. Security teams may have the tools in place to investigate and respond to these incidents, but these tools have limited integration and correlation, resulting in limited visibility and slower response times.
Enter GreyMatter. ReliaQuest’s platform unifies and integrates existing SIEM, EDR, multi-cloud, and third-party apps to deliver a centralized, transparent view across the environment. With GreyMatter’s investigations, data from multiple technologies is streamlined, aggregated and visualized in a fraction of the time, resulting in faster investigations. Efficiency can be further enhanced with GreyMatter’s automation capabilities – where repeated actions like resetting passwords or disabling accounts can be automated to ensure faster remediation and consistency across incidents.