Understanding Phishing:

Account Takeover

One of the most pernicious forms of phishing involves account takeover. In these attacks, bad actor harvests, guesses, or brute-forces the password for an email account, and then uses this account to impersonate a person or brand often with devastating results.

acct take

Every phishing email has to come from some source email account: some mail server has to initiate an SMTP session with one or more
other mail servers to cause the phishing email to get delivered to its intended victim. So the phisher needs some mail server to send his evil emails.

Where can he get this mail server? Broadly, he has three options: he can set up his own mail server, he can use a free shared mail infrastructure like Gmail, or he can take over someone’s legitimate account on their organization’s mail server. At INKY we see vast amounts of all three kinds, but the latter ATO type is in many ways the nastiest, for several reasons. 

What's inside this guide:

  • Learn how cybercriminals execute account takeover phishing scams
  • Analysis of examples used in third-party account takeover
  • Techniques used by INKY to detect and prevent ATO
  • and more!

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Cybercrime Expected To Cost The World $10.5 Trillion Annually By 2025.

INKY is a cloud-based email security solution that blocks spam, malware, and — most importantly — phishing attacks. Utilizing computer vision, artificial intelligence, and machine learning INKY catches everything. Driven, curious, mobile, and growing smarter by the subject line, INKY adds a thin—but powerful— layer of protection like no other.