How Cybercriminals Bypass Your Email Security

Have you ever wondered how phishing attacks end up in your inbox? Most email clients, such as Outlook and Gmail, have built-in features to filter out potential threats. It's also likely that your organization has additional security measures in place to help protect your work account. Unfortunately, cybercriminals have found clever ways to bypass this security and sneak their attacks into your inbox.

Technical Tactics

Most security filters work by searching emails for specific text patterns, file formats, or links to known suspicious websites. Scammers often bypass this feature by hosting a malicious file on a legitimate file-sharing service like Dropbox or Google Drive. Your email filters will not see the linked file as a threat because it is hosted on a trusted website.

Remember never to trust a link within an email that you were not expecting, even if it is to a familiar website.

Social Engineers

Cybercriminals can also completely avoid security filters by sending phishing emails that don’t include links or attachments. Instead, they use a technique called social engineering. Social engineering is when a scammer poses as someone else and tricks you into sharing sensitive information. The phishing email may appear to be from someone important, such as your manager or a member of your IT department. Then, the scammers try to use this disguise to trick you into replying with sensitive information, sending a confidential attachment, or even wiring money to them.

Remember to stop and think before you take action. Were you expecting this email? Is this an unusual request? Is there another way that this person can, or should, securely gather this information?

A Human Touch

Technology will never catch all threats because the attackers are human. That’s why it's so important to become a strong part of your organization’s human firewall.

Remember to stay vigilant and look out for suspicious emails. Nothing can catch a cybercriminal more effectively than being part of a human firewall.