INKY | Industries | Automotive

Why and How do Phishers Target Automotive Companies?

With the worldwide production of more than 75 million vehicles, the automotive sector represents a substantial proportion of all countries' economies. In the United States, which produces more than 17 million vehicles per year, the industry takes in more than $1 billion in annual revenue and employs more than three-quarters of a million people. The sector represents 3-3.5% of U.S. gross domestic product.

Phishers target the weak points in the automotive sector: less sophisticated firms; firms that transfer high-value products, subassemblies, or inputs; and firms that interact with a wide variety of outside partners, with whom they may be more or less familiar.

Landing successful phishing exploits via an unsuspecting employee lets phishers invade the entire network and drop their payload, which may be a ransomware attack, a credential harvesting operation, or a means to exfiltrate valuable intellectual property — or even money.

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How are Automotive Companies Currently Protected?

At the moment, most firms in the automotive industry deliver their email through either their own on-premise Exchange server or a secure email gateway (SEG) provider — including but not limited to Microsoft, Proofpoint, and Mimecast. These services have only rudimentary protection against phishing. Phishing attacks are like nuclear missile sallies. It’s not enough to stop 99% of them; it has to be 100%.

In the tight window between when an email server receives a mail and when it has to deliver it to a recipient’s inbox, the SEGs can only examine the universal email tests (DKIM and SPF), take a cursory look at the nature of the message with regular expression matching, and look up the sender’s address on whatever bad lists they have on the shelf. With this limited examination, they can't spot the phish. And this is the best case. Most can’t run their full analysis stack on every email because it takes too long.

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How Does INKY Stop Phishing Attacks on Automotive Companies?

INKY sits downstream from the SEG and spends less than two seconds looking at an email before dropping it in the recipient’s inbox. From this position, INKY catches all the phish that get past the SEGs (proof that they’re not catching them and we are).

One more model takes the output of all the rest and comes up with an overall score that represents how bad INKY thinks the email is. This value is interpreted to create a colored banner, which is inserted in the email before it's passed on to the recipient’s inbox (and pulled back out of any reply on the way out).

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