Partner POV | Cloudflare One Platform: Safeguard Your Workforce from Multi-Channel Phishing

This article was written and contributed by, Cloudflare. 

Phishing attacks are no longer limited to just email

While email continues to be the most prevalent and effective delivery mechanism for phishing campaigns, attackers are increasingly using clever tactics that target and exploit users across multiple channels (i.e. applications) used for daily communication and collaboration. These attacks often employ cleverly obfuscated links to deceive users and pivot their target to malicious content and insecure environments. 

More channels = more ways to exploit employees

Targeting employees with deceptive links within email and other collaboration apps allows attackers to circumvent traditional detection methods while engaging users in a way that increases the perception of authenticity. This raises the risk of an employee clicking on malicious web content, divulging credentials, or leaking sensitive information. Email security can only help when an attack originates via inboxes, but a broader security solution is required to block these attacks when they spread to other apps.

Challenges

Multi-channel threats can bypass traditional email filtering

Multi-channel attacks leverage complex link obfuscation and various collaboration apps to bait users into clicking malicious content or leaking sensitive information. This type of attack can be difficult to address due to:

• Link obfuscation (URL redirects/shorteners)
• Image-based URLs (QR codes)
• Deferred attacks (activated post-delivery)
• Distributed engagement across work apps

Solution

Unified security at every point of phishing exposure

Stopping multi-channel attacks requires a platform that can address the full scope of vulnerabilities that exist in employee workflows and in-app interactions. Thatʼs why Cloudflare offers the most complete phishing solution focused on delivering seamless protection across employees and applications. Leveraging the Cloudflare One platform, organizations can take advantage of natively-integrated email security (ES) + Zero Trust services to deploy layered protection for email, self-hosted apps, SaaS apps, and Internet apps — providing defense-in-depth to stop fraudulent payments and data breaches.

Stop email-borne threats (ES)

With email representing the most used and most exploited business application, itʼs more critical than ever to shield users from phishing attacks that seek to manipulate their trust through email. By augmenting or replacing current email defenses with Cloudflare, organizations can automatically mitigate sophisticated phishing attacks that leverage embedded email links, attachments, and impersonated or compromised accounts to steal sensitive information and commit financial fraud.

Cloudflareʼs lightweight, cloud-native solution can be deployed in minutes to complement the built-in email capabilities provided by Microsoft and Google. With greater automation and minimal tuning needed for optimal results, Cloudflare significantly reduces the time and effort required for ongoing management.

Business Email Compromise (BEC)

AI/ML-powered content analysis deconstructs every message to evaluate conversation history, writing patterns, sentiment, and other variables to determine the authenticity of the sender.

Ransomware & malicious attachments

ML detection models on payloads, signatureless detection, computer vision, remote extraction, and other forms of analysis are used to identify encrypted and unencrypted malicious payloads.

Malicious email links

Advanced techniques for deconstructing and drilling-down into complex URLs are combined with adaptive link isolation to ensure a safe, frictionless web experience for employees.

Mitigate OAuth phishing attacks (CASB)

OAuth phishing takes advantage of legitimate identity providers and authorization workflows to bait users into granting permissions to malicious apps. The Cloudflare One platform delivers the ability to detect such apps while providing remediation guidance to quickly mitigate these threats.

Prevent breaches from compromised credentials (ZTNA)

While many organizations implement extensive preventative measures to avoid employee credentials from landing in the wrong hands, the painful truth is that preventative measures are never 100% foolproof. In the unfortunate case that credentials are stolen or unknowingly leaked, there must be a last-line-of-defense to prevent an all out breach.

With Cloudflare Access acting as an aggregation layer around every resource, including self-hosted or non-web resources, organizations can consistently enforce FIDO2-compliant authentication for phishing-resistant MFA. So even in the event that employee credentials are compromised, organizations are still able to ensure that their data is protected.

Isolate link-based attacks (ES + RBI + SWG)

Link-based attacks have become the go-to method for stealing credentials, loading malware/ransomware, and extracting sensitive information. Using a combination of email, chat, SMS, social, and cloud drives to deliver these links further complicates the process of ensuring that both employees and data are protected from targeted phishing attacks.

Cloudflare Browser Isolation solves for link-based phishing attacks by rendering all web code remotely on our global cloud network instead of on the userʼs local device. This mitigates malware and browser zero days, while also providing granular control over user actions (e.g. disable keyboard input) to prevent credential harvesting and data leaks.

Eliminate phishing risk without slowing down your workforce

By integrating next-generation browser isolation capabilities built on our unique Network Vector Rendering (NVR) technology, Cloudflare is able to deliver a seamless, secure, and scalable solution for isolating potentially malicious links. Unlike bandwidth-heavy techniques, NVR streams safe draw commands to the device. This helps eliminate the risk of malicious web content without impacting the end-user experience. Thanks to NVR and Cloudflareʼs low-latency network, organizations can isolate multi-channel threats while ensuring disruption-free productivity for their employees.

Benefits

Complete multi-channel protection

As phishing campaigns rapidly expand beyond email, it's now more urgent than ever for organizations to implement a phishing solution that provides a quick and simple path to full multi-channel protection. 

Using the Cloudflare One platform, organizations can first deploy industry-leading email security to quickly address the most critical phishing channel; then easily enable additional Zero Trust services to extend protection to all channels — effectively stopping known and emerging phishing threats.

• Low-touch, high efficacy protection: Minimize phishing risk with industry-leading detection efficacy that requires minimal tuning.
• Greater consolidation, lower cost: Reduce spend with a single, fully-integrated platform that solves for all phishing use cases.
• Fast to deploy, easy to manage: Ensure immediate protection while reducing the time and effort needed for ongoing management.