Weaponized Email Attachments — A Solution for the Enterprises of Tomorrow
By: Alex Panagides
Tags: Virus, Cloud Storage, Security, Email

Despite significant investments in defensive technologies, email continues to be the leading security threat. Creative integration of cloud storage technologies can leverage the human mind for potentially one of the most effective defenses yet.

Over the last couple weeks, we’ve been reminded about the dangers of email. Despite significant deployments of antivirus, data loss prevention and other defensive systems, email continues to be the number one attack vector for hackers. As we’ve posted before, content is safer outside of email than inside.

Email and email attachment payloads are often being used by ill-intended actors to deliver “weaponized” files, or files that have been altered with the intent of infecting the recipient’s device. In one recent case, the attack vector is a PDF attachment with an embedded URL routing through Google’s infrastructure and in the most recent example, image files like png and jpeg sent as email attachments are used to compromise Android devices.

These ill-intended exploit strategies, at their essence, are exploiting human tendencies. Like all humans, email users are creatures of habit that often get distracted. One email attachment in a daily user average of 120 messages, is all it takes for the hackers to gain a foothold within the organization.

Whenever content can interact directly with the end user, hackers can spring their trap. When users open content locally, i.e. on their laptop, mobile phone, etc. hackers have an opening to execute code behind the company’s defenses.

If hackers can leverage our humanity to penetrate our virtual walls, might there be a counter strategy that uses that same humanity to strengthen our defense?

While hackers are skilled at embedding malicious code in files, what they can’t engineer at scale is content that is meaningful to the recipient. In other words, if users were able to safely inspect the attached document proactively, they could readily ascertain if a document is suspicious. An invoice from an unknown vendor for an unknown product to a nonexistent employee is suspicious, especially when it’s received by an account executive who has no role with company procurement. In other words, if we can allow the human brain to do the pattern recognition and contextualization that it does do well, we can more effectively defeat this type of assault.

Modern cloud content management platforms like Egnyte, Box and Microsoft’s OneDrive combined with technologies like mxHero provide a ready means of ensuring that email attachments can first be safely inspected by the user away from the user’s devices before being downloaded and opened locally. Through an automated software enabled process to auto-extract email attachment payloads in favor of secure and collaboration-based links to modern cloud and hybrid-based content management platforms, users have a natural defense against weaponized content attachments.

Letting users open files safely away from their devices

Importantly, the process can be centrally deployed and controlled, requiring nothing of the recipients or senders in terms of software or training. As such, user adoption is not an issue. Furthermore, it works uniformly across every device and all email systems.

Attachments automatically moved to cloud storage for safe preview before download

By innovatively combining technologies that take advantage of our human strengths we can better defend against those ill-intended content weaponization efforts that exploit our human weaknesses. At a time when “artificial intelligence” is all the rage, let’s not forget that “real human intelligence” and common sense, with the use of available technology today, might be one of the best solutions.

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