Every day, Microsoft Defender for Office 365 encounters around one billion brand impersonation emails. Our security solutions use multiple detection and prevention techniques to help users avoid divulging sensitive information to phishers as attackers continue refining their impersonation tricks. In this blog, we discuss our latest innovation toward developing another detection layer focusing on the visual components of brand impersonation attacks. We presented this approach in our Black Hat briefing Siamese neural networks for detecting brand impersonation today.

Today’s cybersecurity threats continue to find ways to fly and stay under the radar. Cybercriminals use polymorphic malware because a slight change in the binary code or script could allow the said threats to avoid detection by traditional antivirus software. Threat actors customize their wares specific to their target organizations to increase their chances of breaking into and moving laterally through an entire corporate network, exfiltrating data, and leaving with little or no trace. The underground economy is rife with malware builders, Trojanized versions of legitimate applications, and other tools and services that allow malware operators to deploy highly evasive malware.