FireEye Mandiant M-Trends reports that impersonating IT departments in spear-phishing attacks is becoming an increasingly popular tactic among hackers, particularly in cyber-espionage attacks.

FireEye reported that IT department phishing emails comprised 78 per cent of observed phishing schemes picked up by FireEye in 2014, compared to just 44 per cent in 2013.

The report goes on to state that lag time is improving slightly. Breach detection times dropped from 229 days in 2013 to 205 days last year. The slight improvement still means that successful hacker attacks remain undetected for months.

Mandiant’s security incident response work picked up a common thread in major retail breaches last year. Retailers reckoned their virtual machines were sufficiently secured but did not implement two-factor authentication, meaning a single stolen user credential could make their entire network vulnerable.

More details can be found in the 2015 Mandiant M-Trends report (PDF).

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