How Machine Learning Can Help Counter Spear Phishing Attacks

The increasing number of Spear phishing attacks has given birth to an unprecedented trepidation amongst the internet users who are now more concerned about their account security than ever before. With this being a daily occurance, people don’t easily fall in trap of these phishing pages these days owing to the increasing awareness. However, these phishing attacks are getting so gruesome these days that no matter how sophisticated you are, you may easily fall into the trap and end up losing your valuable data or account details.

Thank heavens! We have access to some highly advanced technologies today that can be used to curb the dreadful incidents like spear phishing attacks. In this blog, you’ll know how an AI-based technology, Machine Learning can be used to eradicate these phishing attacks once and for all.

What Are Spear Phishing Attacks?

Spear phishing is an email-spoofing technique that attempts to obtain an unauthorized access to the sensitive information of an organization or individual. While most people consider these attacks as an act of hacking, it’s not exactly the case. Most of the times, the Spear Phishing attacks are initiated by the perpetrators rather than the hackers. The primary objective of such attacks is to gain the financial information, trade info or military secrets.

Compared to the other spammy emails that you often receive, spear phishing messages appear to be coming from a trusted source and may not land in your spam box. So it’s more likely that you may fall for these emails if you find them useful.

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How Can Machine Learning Help Fight Spear Phishing?

Machine Learning is a powerful tool that is used to analyze data and extract patterns out of the given data. It makes use of the complex AI algorithms that render self-learning capabilities to the machines and make them recognize patterns in user data in order to know their choices and preferences.

Machine Learning and Anomaly detection algorithms can be applied to limit the outspread of spear phishing emails and put a full stop to these kind of cyber attacks.  Let’s see how!

Social Graph Analysis

Building the social graph of a company is one of the very first steps that you need to follow in order to apply Machine Learning to detect spear phishing emails.

It’s actually pretty simple! A social graph can be created either by weighting connections between the employees of a company based on their frequency or by observing the information included in the headers of each email sent within the company.

Once a social graph has been created, one can observe connections used by each of the emails received by a company or individual. And when these emails are compared with the original model, Machine Learning algorithms can help detect spear phishing emails.

Also read Advantages of Machine Learning in DevOps.

Email Structural Analysis

Another way you can detect spear phishing is by performing a structural analysis of emails that you or your organization is receiving and carefully observing the headers that are not included in the emails which can be done through Machine Learning.   

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

NLP is a field that is focused on making computers learn how to understand a language and respond accordingly. NLP techniques can also be used to analyze written text and extract useful information out of the given text. Using the same linguistic analysis, you can detect different types of phishing emails that might be lying in your inbox.