Preventing Phishing Attacks and Creating Awareness

Overview

The client wanted to protect their user accounts from getting compromised by using various tactics. This meant setting up prevention strategies and awareness programs for mail hygiene and ethics.

Moreover, suppose an account is still compromised. In that case, they need to minimise the losses and prevent damages from further affecting the organisation, including bringing the compromised accounts back into a zero-damage state.

Problem Statement and Challenges

Recently, the client has observed that their organisation was attacked by malicious intent individuals who target their employees via emails. And due to a lack of awareness, their employees got trapped and eventually ended up compromising their accounts.

This created a security loophole inside the organisation, and the client wanted to patch that up by setting up a Security Operations Center.

Solution

We started building security operations centres with a team of cybersecurity experts geared towards the client's specific needs.

And we began by setting up a sandbox, which checks for backdoors, links and any other malicious practices for incoming and outgoing mail in an isolated virtual network.

On top of that, we also configured email compliances and rules that automatically move emails to the spam folder if checking all the boxes for such categorization.

We also proactively monitored the mail flow within the organisation, user inbox rules, and more to enforce compliance to prevent data from moving outside the organisation.

If an account is compromised, recovery systems are set up to mitigate the damages and return it to a 'Zero Damage State'. Active sessions and log to any organisation tool are monitored vigilantly post-recovery to verify the integrity of the account.

Lastly, as requested by the client, we also created interactive phishing campaigns and knowledge exchange programs, which helped educate the employees.

Mail Flow Monitoring
Security Information and Event Managemen
Sandboxing
Vigilant Check on Inbox Rules
Remote Session Management
Mail Compliance Configuration
Microsoft Defender 365
Conducting Phishing Awareness Campaigns

Results and Success Criteria

The client started focusing more on the business side instead of worrying about internal data security, which boosted their productivity. With the help of interactive phishing campaigns and awareness drives, the click-through rate for these emails decreased significantly

Moreover, with a more robust system that filters all malicious intent behaviours, the chances for data breaches are reduced to almost zero.