Christopher Hadnagy
Phishing Dark Waters, The Offensive and Defensive Sides of Malicious Emails
Phishing Dark Waters
The Offensive and Defensive Sides of Malicious E-mails
Christopher Hadnagy
Michele Fincher
Phishing Dark Waters: The Offensive and Defensive Sides of Malicious E-mails
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I dedicate this book to a few people who made it possible. My amazing wife, Areesa, you are one of the most patient, kind, and wise people I have ever met. I hold on to the dream of an eternal future.
Michele, thankfully Ping made that referral a few years ago. Without you this is not possible.
Dave, as I write these words, I can't believe how far we have come. Thank you for your support.
This is for my husband, the most beautiful soul in the universe and ruler of all my domains.
And to Chris; thank you for giving me a job and believing in me.
Introduction
“There was no such thing as a fair fight. All vulnerabilities must be exploited.”
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 with, more than half the people have told me that they get 100, 150, or 200 e-mails per day!
In 2014, the Radicati Group stated that there are 4.1 billion e-mail addresses in the world. Using that figure and a calculator, I discovered that the average is almost 50 e-mails per person per day, every day of the year. Because we know that not every single person in the world gets that many messages, it is not inconceivable to think that many of us receive 100, 150, or even 250 e-mails per day.
As people get more stressed, as workloads increase, and as the use of technology reaches an all-time high, the scam artists, con men, and social engineers know that e-mail is a great vector into our businesses and homes. Mix that with how easy it is to create fake e-mail accounts,
Social-Engineer Infographic, April 28, 2014, http://www.social-engineer.org/resources/social-engineering-infographic/.
