Why do attackers prefer phishing emails to gain initial access?

A phishing email is a type of social engineering attack where an attacker tricks target victims into opening a malicious file or link or providing personal or confidential information, such as passwords and credit card numbers, through fraudulent emails. The reason why phishing is a preferred and successful way for attackers to gain initial access to the victim’s environment is due to several factors, including the following:

• It is easy during the reconnaissance phase to acquire a list of target victim users’ email addresses.

The reconnaissance phase is the first step taken by intruders to breach a target environment. This phase can last for hours, days, weeks, or even months. During this phase, attackers collect information about the target victim, including their email addresses, which can be used to deliver a weaponized document or link. Attackers can collect email addresses in several ways, such as through job postings, social media platforms such as LinkedIn, third-party subscriptions, data leaks on the dark web, Wayback Machine archives such as Archive.org, or data collection from marketing platforms such as ZoomInfo.com.

• It is not hard to prepare a weaponized attachment or link.

It is relatively easy for an attacker to upload malware to legitimate cloud platforms and then share the download link with the victim through email. They can also weaponize a document through Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros or send the malware executable itself in a compressed format, all of which can be sent to the victim via email.

• Many users lack security awareness.

Attackers exploit the fact that many users may be vulnerable to social engineering attacks, and a majority of them may not have received proper security awareness training to recognize and respond to these threats.

Now that you understand why most attackers choose phishing emails as a way to achieve their goals, such as gaining initial access to the victim’s environment, let us discuss the various email threat types.