Detector that stops lateral phishing attacks

Science Daily  October 29, 2019
Lateral phishing is a phishing email comes from an internal account within the organization. Vast majority of email security systems can’t stop it. According to the FBI data these cyberattacks caused more than $12 billion in losses between 2013-2018. And in the last two years, the attacks have resulted in an increase of 136 percent in losses. A team of researchers in the US (Columbia University, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, industry) has developed a prototype of a machine-learning based detector that automatically detects and stops lateral phishing attacks. They analyzed a dataset of 113 million employee-sent emails from nearly 100 businesses. The detector was able to detect many of these attacks with a high precision rate and a low false positive rate — under four false positives for every one-million employee-sent emails…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE