Although the government’s e-mail reportedly wasn’t compromised in the Gmail hack, federal agencies are nonetheless taking special interest in the cyberattack. China has been accused of hosting hackers who accessed hundreds of Google Gmail accounts, but is aggressively denying the charges. Now security researchers are weighing in.
“If your organization has any electronically stored information that could be of value to someone or some other organization, then you should assume that an attempt to access it will be made through some type of cyberattack or social-engineering attempt,” said Mike Paquette, chief strategy officer for Top Layer Security. “E-mail accounts of government officials or political figures clearly fall into this category.”
Similar attacks have been reported by users of Microsoft’s Hotmail and Yahoo Mail.
Highly Targeted Attacks
He said phishing attacks are becoming more targeted, and are using more target-relevant context to lure recipients into providing information. However, he noted, motivations for phishing attacks continue to include theft, fraud and other attempts at illicit financial gain as well as political activism.
“Phishing attacks are requiring less user intervention,” Paquette said. “In fact, today many of these attacks are no longer directly asking users to provide sensitive information, but instead rely on tempting the user to click on a hyperlink, launching their web browser to a malicious web site that will remotely exploit their computer, depositing malware that will simply steal the sensitive information and exfiltrate it.”
He explained that these newer “tempt-to-click” e-mails use many of the social-engineering techniques of phishing or spear phishing, but silently steal keystrokes, files, cookies or other pieces of sensitive information. Users need to be educated, he said: Unless you’ve requested the hyperlink, don’t click on it.
Nothing New, Something Old
Fred Touchette, a senior security analyst at AppRiver, said these attacks are nothing new. He doesn’t believe the Google hack in particular…
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