Detecting and characterizing lateral phishing at scale
Detecting and characterizing lateral phishing at scale Ho et al., USENIX Security Symposium 2019
This is an investigation into the phenomenon of lateral phishing attacks. A lateral phishing attack is one where a compromised account within an organisation is used to send out further phishing emails (typically to other employees within the same organisation). So ‘alice at example.com’ might receive a phishing email that has genuinely been sent by ‘bob at example.com’, and thus is more likely to trust it.
In recent years, work from both industry and academia has pointed to the emergence and growth of lateral phishing attacks: a new form of phishing that targets a diverse range of organizations and has already incurred billions of dollars in financial harm…. This attack proves particularly insidious because the attacker automatically benefits from the implicit trust in the hijacked account: trust from both human recipients and conventional email protection systems.

A dataset of 113 million emails…
The study is conducted in conjunction with Barracuda Networks, who obtained customer permission to use email data from the Office 365 employee mailboxes of 92 different organisations. 69 of these organisations were selected through random sampling across all organisations, and 23 Continue reading


