​Following the release of the C-Level Impersonation filter to protect specific company C-Level executives and officers from ‘whaling’ attacks, FirstWave Cloud Technology introduces another advanced phishing protection feature on its market- leading ESPTM Mail cloud security platform - Typo Domain Filter. 

Squarely designed to deflect and block sophisticated email phishing threats targeting the wider attack surface of email users at any organisation level in the enterprise, this new filter will deliver added email threat protection and peace of mind for businesses and enterprises.  

Cyber attackers can take advantage of Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) with special character sets to create and send phishing emails from servers using legitimately-established domain names indistinguishable to most recipients from well-known or trusted domain names.  These are sometimes known under the banner of homograph attacks or imposter email attacks. 

Moreover, attackers can apply this technique and use a homograph of a company’s own domain name or names to trick employees of that company to accept and click on links in emails that appear to be legitimately coming from within their own organisation. 

The majority of existing email security and phishing filters cannot assure they will block such an attack. Standard sender domain authentication techniques used by email transport nodes and email security gateways, such as SPF and DKIM, can be penetrated because these homograph domains can appear authentic in the DNS system.     

To provide a robust, broad yet enterprise specific defence against this form of attack, FirstWave Cloud Technology has introduced the Typo Domain filter. Using advanced ‘fuzzy matching‘  software library algorithms in its ESPTM Mail platform, rigorously tested against a wide range of homograph domain attack scenarios,  this new filter will provide high protection efficacy and very low false positives.  This will address shortcomings in other secure email solutions. 

To deliver maximal IT security assurance, the typo domain filter will automatically protect all customer domains already configured on the FirstWave cloud Mail security service, without the need for any customer administrator configuration action. 

This announcement is a continuation of FirstWave Cloud Technology’s investment in its unique cloud based intelligent content security platform to deliver broad spectrum protection for the specific needs of its business and enterprise customers.

​FirstWave Cloud Technology launches new email C-Level Impersonation filter to combat the rising risk of targeted ‘Whaling’ phishing attacks.

In the recent past, the incidence of incoming emails sometimes known as “whaling” or “CEO impersonation fraud emails” has increased quite noticeably, representing a greater threat to companies including private and public enterprise from sophisticated actors seeking to exploit weaknesses in company payment control and authorisation procedures to illegally gain financial advantage. Sometimes dubbed the ‘Bogus Boss’ email scam, instances of companies affected by the fraud have been reported in the media recently, one being a French firm called Etna Industrie.
 
Recognising the rising frequency  and detrimental  business impacts of this email fraud technique, FirstWave Cloud Technology has introduced a new C-Level Impersonation filter to its existing public cloud Email content security product, to further improve protection for all of its customers.
 
“The majority of current Spam and Phishing filters used in premises-based technologies and cloud -based Email security services focus on spoofing detection and sender name blacklists which are not effective in protecting businesses and enterprises from this targeted threat. The solution we have developed is designed to detect and block the various forms of ‘whaling’ attacks, specifically tailorable to protect a company’s C-Level executives, key employees and officers”, said Roger Carvosso, FirstWave Cloud Technology Portfolio and Marketing Director.
 
This new C-Level Impersonation filter feature is part of FirstWave’s own unique Enterprise Specific Protection (ESP)™ software technology and reinforces FirstWaves’ core philosophy of addressing the specific security, threat protection and analytics requirements of each organisation it serves.

The classification algorithm used by this C-Level Impersonation filter has been designed, trained and verified by the FirstWave software development team to achieve high protection effectiveness with low false positives.