Электронная почта стала главной мишенью хакеров: как маскировка адресов спасает компании от фишинга

Sponsored by NordPass How email masking prevents phishing & spam attacks across the workforce As the largest enterprise attack surface, the work email address has a permanent target on its back Saying that phishing is a problem is much like saying that the fire is hot. It’s obvious. Yet, we can’t ever underestimate the level of persistence and sophistication cybercriminals frequently exhibit, especially when it comes to corporate email inboxes. As the largest enterprise attack surface, the work email address has a permanent target on its back. Once it enters public databases or surfaces in an external breach, the damages are astronomical. To be precise, Business Email Compromise (BEC) alone drove over $3 billion annually in 2025, according to the FBI. Thankfully, email masking largely solves this vulnerability at the source. It separates an employee's inbox from their external digital footprint, which stops phishing campaigns and spam cascades in their tracks. In other words, email masking helps keep corporate credentials from falling into the wrong hands. Why attackers favor corporate inboxes Arguably, the main problem stems from the email itself, namely its design. It’s a communication tool, not built for tight security in today's all-digital world. And because standard email protocols lack intrinsic verification, attackers have little problem abusing this open infrastructure. Corporate inboxes serve as the enterprise’s administrative nerve center, however lacking they may be. Just one compromised inbox provides criminals with instant access to internal SaaS portals, sensitive internal and external communications, user privileges, password-reset mechanics, and virtually everything else available across the entire organization. Specifically, attackers target corporate inboxes due to three major structural advantages: - Built-in trust: Emails sent from a compromised corporate address automatically bypass external spam filters. Moreover, they have a high level of credibility, which allows threat actors to exploit established business relationships for social engineering. - Centralized Single Sign-on (SSO) and password resets: Since almost every business app relies on the employee’s primary email for account recovery and two-factor verification codes, control of the inbox translates to control over the entire cloud environment in most cases. - Access to financial data: Corporate inboxes are full of high-value operational correspondence. Pending invoices, receipts, wire instructions, payroll details, and the like provide hackers with the relevant context to pull off financial fraud. It doesn’t take much to deliver malicious content directly to employee screens. Sadly, it also doesn’t take much for these efforts to be successful. They succeed primarily because they exploit human trust, as opposed to cracks in the software. Credential phishing lures take the cake here, as attackers send fraudulent emails mimicking virtually anyone. From trusted vendors and partners to HR portals and IT helpdesks, they trick workers into entering passwords on malicious sign-in pages. Mass spamming doesn’t lag much, if at all. Automated bots harvest corporate email addresses from publicly available places (social media profiles and business directories), not to mention leaked marketing databases. They are relatively easy to make, which increases the sheer scale of these attacks. How work email gets weaponized The corporate email address is an employee’s primary digital identity marker. As such, it inherently exposes the organization to security risks specifically centered around targeted phishing campaigns and relentless inbox spam, like: Third-party data breaches When any related third-party entity suffers a breach, be it a SaaS vendor or a webinar platform, email addresses and password hashes surface online. Bad actors cross-reference this leaked information with automated credential-stuffing tools to test whether employees reuse passwords on internal portals like, say, identity and access management (IAM). That’s only one part of the equation. Beyond what is essentially password guessing, cybercriminals feed leaked addresses from external breaches into automated phishing lists. They then parse these databases to launch tailored phishing campaigns that do a good enough job of mimicking the compromised platform itself. One common example is a fake urgent alert regarding account security. The time pressure basically circumvents rational thinking and forces the user into making a quick decision. As a result, they often surrender internal SSO credentials on impulse. Cross-site identity correlation Cybercriminals are smart, at least some. You see, they actively build intelligence profiles on their targets, be it individuals or organizations. So, if an employee uses the company’s email across multiple external platforms, attackers can pick up the pieces and map out the employee’s role, what software they use, which social media they frequent, which vendor relationships they have, and similar. That level of intelligence allows bad actors to come up with highly convincing and personalized spear-phishing emails. For instance, they can spoof fake subscription renewals since they know what’s in an employee's software stack. Or, they can send pressing vendor invoice updates or fraudulent IT helpdesk tickets that look like part of legitimate daily work communications. Spam It’s a game of numbers. Once a primary corporate email address lands on shady marketing lists, it receives a seemingly endless stream of unsolicited emails. The more spam there is, the higher the odds that a busy worker will accidentally click a malicious link hidden among promotional messaging. Once again, there’s more to the story. Spam is dirt cheap, which is why relying on a small percentage of recipients falling for the trap makes sense for criminals. High spam volumes create severe inbox fatigue, so employees are conditioned to skim and, subsequently, miss key warning signs. Plus, spam is often the foundational step in more sophisticated phishing attacks, where threat actors neatly package emails to appear legit. Surely, you’ve at least once received a fake email from a “bank”. Lastly, spam’s impact goes beyond deceptive phishing links and attachments infected with malware. It drains resources, including employee time spent sorting through stuff that is highly irrelevant. Such inefficiency drives down productivity and consumes IT budgets. How email masking shields employees Email masking replaces an employee’s email address with an automatically generated alternative. In doing so, all messages sent to the masked address are securely forwarded to the employee’s primary inbox. Yet, the sender never sees or learns the user's actual corporate email. And before there’s any confusion with email forwarding, let’s clarify the difference between the two. A second email where you forward everything to your main inbox still represents a fixed identity. Meaning, it can be breached and tied back to you just like the initial/original email. Forwarding merely redirects incoming traffic; it doesn’t separate accounts or dramatically minimize your exposure. With email masking, you get unique aliases for each service you use. Since each alias is separate, there’s no single point of failure as with basic forwarding. If an alias gets spammed or leaked, you can disable just that one without affecting your other accounts. Let’s look at the core mechanisms that shield the workforce against phishing and spam: No correlation between credentials A unique masked email address for every external service means employees never use their primary corporate address. If they never use it, it can never appear in third-party database breaches. Even if a third-party platform is fully compromised, attackers only obtain an isolated alias. It won’t work on other websites as a password reset email, nor can cybercriminals use it to guess the employee's main SSO login identifier. It’s solely a disposable forwarding address. One-click spam and phishing containment In instances when a work email gets spammed to oblivion, changing it is difficult. You have to notify clients and partners, update admin records, reconfigure account settings across the entire tech stack, re-subscribe to services, and so on. With email masking, containing a compromised address requires a single click. All it takes is for the worker or IT administrator to deactivate or delete the affected alias. Future messages sent to it are automatically discarded before ever reaching the corporate mail server. This instant revocation cuts off active spear-phishing sequences as they go, so threat actors can’t continue targeting the employee even if they rotate sender domains. Immediate identification of a breach source Because each masked email alias is tied exclusively to a single vendor or service, employees can immediately pinpoint who leaked or sold their data if spam or phishing arrives at that email. For example, if an email alias created specifically for a research tool suddenly receives a fake invoice notification, it’s safe to assume that what you’re seeing is a phishing attempt. In effect, each alias serves as an early-warning signal that an external vendor has been compromised before official public breach disclosures. Isolation of high-risk departments It’s no secret that some departments face the highest risk from phishing and spam since they handle the most sensitive data there is. That’s why the likes of HR, Finance, Sales, and IT (to name a few) receive hundreds of external emails every day from unknown senders. Equipping these teams with email masking enables them to go on with their daily tasks, whether it’s dealing with job applicants or new vendors, without exposing their corporate email identities. Turn every inbox into an active shield Another neat aspect of email masking is that it integrates directly into daily employee workflows. By embedding masking directly into enterprise password managers and browser extensions, organizations give employees one-click alias generation during web signups, so primary SSO identifiers stay hidden from external databases. With such an integrated approach, it’s possible to simplify breach containment and have less of an administrative burden on your hands. The affected alias is completely isolated from corporate networks and can be revoked instantly with a single click from either the employee's browser extension or the central management console. What’s more, future malicious emails targeting that address are dropped automatically before ever reaching the mail server. Ultimately, email masking provides IT leadership with full visibility over external address usage, which allows security teams to protect the corporate perimeter where work takes place. Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed! Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.