Cloudy biz Datrix locks down phishing attack in 15 mins after fat thumb triggers email badness

Cloud-'n'-comms biz Datrix has suffered a phishing attack that resulted in some customers' contact details being compromised – though the company reckons it contained the attack within 15 minutes. The London-based firm sent an email to its customers earlier this week, seen by El Reg, confirming it had been "the target of a …

[Wellyboot]

a compromised supplier of Datrix's

Once a known contact gets compromised you're going to be in the firing line and security tools can only go so far.

Nice to see that the boss here has a realistic outlook on the problem.

[DavCrav]

"Datrix told its customers in a fresh email alerting them to the incident. Company reps also phoned all of those who had been emailed by the phishers to ensure the warning got through, Wirszycz told us."

This is how a breach should be dealt with. Yes, you shouldn't click on links in e-mails, but it will occasionally happen. The point is, when it does, to be ready and swing into action immediately. Afterwards, you need to assess the damage quickly, alert everyone compromised, and be up-front about what happened. The extra phone call is just another layer of security.

Most other companies could learn from this response.

[Anonymous Coward]

Domain names are case insensitive?

“Those emails, sent to tempt finance bods into paying fake invoices, linked to a fake domain: datrlx.co.uk (with a lowercase L) (instead of datrix.co.uk)”.

I don't understand, I though domaiN nAmes were case insensitive?

[Jimmy2Cows]

Re: Domain names are case insensitive?

Nothing to do with case sensitivity. The lowercase L can be easily misread as an i. The fake domain name was intended to look, at a cursory glance, like the legit domain name.

[Pascal Monett]

I did a double-take on that as well, and had to look twice to spot the subterfuge.

Taught me a lesson today : pay double attention when URLs contain "i" or "l".

[EnviableOne]

Re: Domain names are case insensitive?

All about the homo-glyphs

ｅｎｖｉａｂｌｅ

is very difrent from enviable

[Robert Helpmann??]

Re: Domain names are case insensitive?

ｅｎｖｉａｂｌｅ is very difrent from enviable

Oddly enough, Chrome views them as the same when I search for them on the page while other applications do not. That looks like a bad implementation to me and makes me wonder if it is open to abuse. Unicode strikes again!

[Jimmy2Cows]

after fat thumb triggers email badness

For some reason I misread that as email baldness, which was a bit confusing.

[GnuTzu]

Mobile Phone Touch Screens

Yeah, I get ticked at phone apps. Too often what I intended to be scrolling was taken as a single click. There's a serious design problem here. And, even for those that never run into this problem, email links should still never, ever just take off on a single click.

[razorfishsl]

So why are they not scanning incoming emails from suppliers?

[gcamdatrix]

We had several layers of security which unfortunately failed to detect the malicious link.