Phishing attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated, especially with the rise of cloud phishing attacks. The ProArch SOC is continuously monitoring these evolving tactics to ensure our clients stay protected. Our team tracks emerging email threat patterns and cloud-based attack vectors in real time, helping organizations stay ahead of cyber threats before they cause disruption.
One trend gaining significant momentum is attackers exploiting legitimate cloud mailing platforms—such as Mailgun and SendGrid—to send phishing emails that appear completely trustworthy. These messages often pass standard authentication checks, making them far harder for users and traditional security filters to detect.
By mimicking internal teams, referencing real business context, and crafting sender addresses that look familiar, attackers significantly increase the chances of user engagement. Their objective remains the same: credential theft, account compromise, and enabling further social engineering attacks.
ProArch SOC Observations
- Multiple campaigns detected where attackers used third-party mailing platforms (Mailgun, SendGrid) to send large volumes of cloud-based phishing emails.
- Emails often impersonate internal personnel or business partners, referencing company-specific context to appear credible.
- Sender addresses are crafted to resemble legitimate internal addresses, though domains are unrelated.
- Embedded links redirect users to credential-harvesting portals or malicious websites hosted on spoofed domains.
- Early detection through sandboxing, anomalous sender analysis, and other email factors prevented credential compromise in all observed cases.
Your team gets in. Threat actors don’t.
ProArch SOC Capabilities
What’s Happening?
Exploitation of Cloud Mailing Services
- Attackers use cloud mailing services like Mailgun and SendGrid to bypass spam and phishing detection mechanisms.
- Emails impersonate internal staff or trusted partners, often referencing company-specific context or meetings.
- Links redirect to spoofed portals designed to capture credentials or sensitive data.
SOC Detection & Response
- Anomalous sender behavior and domain spoofing flagged for investigation.
- Users were alerted, emails sandboxed and deleted, malicious links blocked, and suspicious sender addresses added to blocklists.
The Risks
- Bypassing Security Controls: Trusted cloud mail platforms make phishing emails appear legitimate, increasing the chance of bypassing filters.
- Credential Theft Risk:Highly personalized impersonation techniques greatly increase user engagement with malicious email content.
- Operational Impact: Targeted users may be distracted, increasing chances of falling for scams.
Recommendations
- Monitor for unusual inbound emails from cloud mailing services.
- Educate users on verifying requests from internal staff or external partners.
- Encourage reporting of suspicious emails via “Report Message” or similar mechanisms.
- Audit email flow logs for bulk external messages or unusual patterns.
- Implement advanced phishing detection tools and link scanning.
ProArch offers advanced phishing detection, response, and prevention services—leveraging real-time threat intelligence, SOC monitoring and cloud security expertise to keep your organization protected. If you need expert support or guidance on phishing protection, contact ProArch.