Phishers Hone Skills, Craft More Impressive Attacks

CWmike writes "Recent break-ins at high-profile targets like the International Monetary Fund demonstrate just how proficient hackers have become at so-called spear phishing, researchers said on Tuesday. 'Today's spear phishing is not only more prevalent but also much more technically proficient,' said Dave Jevans, chairman of the Anti-Phishing Working Group. 'They're not going for a password, anymore; they're getting people to install crimeware on their computers.' The trend highlights the need for defenses against such targeted threats, requiring companies to look beyond security strategies focused purely on dealing with traditional network threats, analysts said. Increasingly, companies also need to focus on approaches such as continuous monitoring of networks, databases, applications and users, outbound traffic filtering and whitelisting."

Special sandbox for 'em

[Mathinker]

No, I think the best is to provide super-special sandboxing for them. One could even periodically send "test probes" to random people on one's network to better judge their level of acumen vs. current phishing techniques. Those who fail (or originally admit to being clueless) get:

• all email which isn't a direct reply to something they originated "held up for review" by some luckless soul in IT
• extra lockdown of their computer, perhaps including physically disabling USB ports and DVD drives
• extra automatic monitoring of their computer for unusual behavior
• segregating them into a special segment of the LAN which is only connected to the rest of the company via a special filtering/monitoring gateway