Skip to Main Content
Phishing Dark Waters: The Offensive and Defensive Sides of Malicious Emails
book

Phishing Dark Waters: The Offensive and Defensive Sides of Malicious Emails

by Robin Dreeke, Michele Fincher, Christopher Hadnagy
April 2015
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
224 pages
5h 13m
English
Wiley
Content preview from Phishing Dark Waters: The Offensive and Defensive Sides of Malicious Emails

Introduction

“There was no such thing as a fair fight. All vulnerabilities must be exploited.”

—Cary Caffrey

Social engineering. Those two words have become a staple in most IT departments and, after the last couple years, in most of corporate America, too. One statistic states that more than 60 percent of all attacks had the “human factor” as either the crux of or a major piece of the attack. Analysis of almost all of the major hacking attacks from the past 12 months reveals that a large majority involved social engineering—a phishing e-mail, a spear phish, or a malicious phone call (vishing).

I have written two books analyzing and dissecting the psychology, physiology, and historical aspects of con men, scammers, and social engineers. And in doing so, I have found that one recent theme comes up, and that is e-mail. Since its beginning, e-mail has been used by scammers and social engineers to dupe people out of credentials, money, information, and much more.

In a recent report, the Radicati Group estimates that in 2014 there was an average of 191.4 billion e-mails sent each day. That equates to more than 69.8 trillion e-mails per year.1 Can you even imagine that number? That is 69,861,000,000,000— staggering, isn't it? Now try to swallow that more than 90 percent of e-mails are spam, according to the information on the Social-Engineer Infographic.2

E-mail has become a part of life. We use it on our computers, our tablets, and our phones. In some groups of people that I've worked ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Detecting and Combating Malicious Email

Detecting and Combating Malicious Email

Julie JCH Ryan, Cade Kamachi
Tribe of Hackers Red Team

Tribe of Hackers Red Team

Marcus J. Carey, Jennifer Jin

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781118958483Purchase book