Phishing Prevention in cybersecurity is a proactive and continuous use case focused on anticipating, detecting, and mitigating fraudulent attempts—typically via email, text, or social media—that use deception to trick individuals into revealing sensitive information, installing malware, or performing unauthorized actions.

It is a critical component of Digital Risk Protection (DRP), centering on threats that originate outside the protected network perimeter but target employees, customers, or partners using the organization's brand or identity.

How ThreatNG Helps with Phishing Prevention

ThreatNG's external focus allows it to detect the setup phase of phishing attacks, often before the first malicious email or message is sent.

External Discovery

ThreatNG performs purely external unauthenticated discovery using no connectors. This is key to finding the fraudulent infrastructure that enables phishing.

• Example: It proactively discovers newly registered, look-alike domains (cybersquatting and typosquatting), such as bankofameerica.com or logon-company.net, that are being prepared by attackers to host fake login pages.

External Assessment

ThreatNG offers an explicit assessment that directly measures an organization's vulnerability to phishing:

• BEC & Phishing Susceptibility: This score evaluates the likelihood of a successful phishing attack, substantiated by Domain Intelligence (including Domain Name Permutations) and Email Intelligence.

  • Example (Technical Defenses): ThreatNG checks the organization's primary domain for the presence and correct configuration of Email Intelligence standards like DMARC, SPF, and DKIM records. A missing or misconfigured DMARC policy, for instance, results in a high susceptibility score, indicating that attackers can easily spoof a legitimate company email address for a phishing campaign without technical filters blocking it.

  • Example (Brand Likeness): The assessment flags high-risk Domain Name Permutations (e.g., mycompany-support.net) that have already been registered (taken) and are using keywords ('support', 'login') often associated with phishing scams.

• Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility: This assessment prevents attackers from using a legitimate but vulnerable company asset to host a phishing site.

  • Example: It detects a dangling DNS record for an old subdomain (contest.mycompany.com) that points to a non-existent cloud service. An attacker could claim that the cloud service takes over the subdomain and hosts a highly credible phishing page, which ThreatNG flags before the takeover occurs.

Reporting

ThreatNG uses its findings to generate prioritized alerts, forcing immediate action on high-risk phishing infrastructure.

• Prioritized Report: The report identifies a newly active typosquatted domain matching the company's brand, with an active mail server and no WHOIS record, classifying it as a Critical phishing threat. This ensures the security team focuses on initiating a domain takedown.

Continuous Monitoring

ThreatNG performs continuous monitoring of the external digital environment, which is essential because phishing campaigns are often launched and shut down rapidly to evade detection.

• Example: It monitors social media and paste sites for sudden increases in posts containing the brand's name alongside suspicious URLs or links. This continuous real-time monitoring catches phishing campaigns immediately upon launch, rather than days later.

Investigation Modules

The Investigation Modules provide the forensic data to validate and map the extent of a phishing threat:

• Domain Intelligence: This is the primary module for uncovering phishing infrastructure.

  • Example: When a suspicious domain is identified, this module provides the DNS Intelligence (IP Identification, Mail Record, Name Server) and WHOIS registration data, which is the evidence required for issuing a takedown notice to the domain registrar. It also uses Targeted Key Words (e.g., 'invoice,' 'verify') to identify malicious domains.

• Dark Web Presence: This module tracks credentials that could be used for highly targeted phishing.

  • Example: It finds Associated Compromised Credentials (usernames and passwords) for C-suite executives on a dark web forum. This indicates a high risk of Executive Impersonation (CEO Fraud), a type of spear phishing where the attacker uses the stolen credentials to craft a hyper-realistic email to trick an employee into wiring funds or releasing data.

• Sensitive Code Exposure: This module identifies data used to create convincing phishing lures.

  • Example: It finds an exposed Configuration File or an unencrypted Access Credential (e.g., an internal list of customer support contacts) on a public code repository. Attackers can use this specific, authentic data to craft highly convincing and targeted phishing emails, making the lure nearly undetectable by the victim.

Intelligence Repositories (DarCache)

ThreatNG’s repositories provide massive, correlated datasets necessary for proactive protection:

• Compromised Credentials (DarCache Rupture): A continuous feed of leaked credentials that allows an organization to immediately identify which employees have exposed accounts, enabling security teams to enforce password resets and block those accounts before they are impersonated in a Business Email Compromise (BEC) phishing scam.

Working with Complementary Solutions

ThreatNG's external threat intelligence and high-fidelity findings can be used with complementary security tools to automate the response to phishing threats.

• Secure Email Gateways (SEGs): ThreatNG utilizes its Domain Intelligence to detect newly created, look-alike domains hosting phishing kits. This intelligence (the malicious domain name and IP address) is immediately sent to the complementary Secure Email Gateway solution. The SEG uses this external intelligence to automatically block all incoming emails originating from that specific malicious domain, neutralizing the phishing campaign before it reaches employee inboxes.

• Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Platforms: When ThreatNG’s Dark Web Presence module detects a large batch of Compromised Credentials belonging to the company's users being dumped online, the complementary SOAR platform ingests this high-severity finding. The SOAR platform automatically triggers a multi-step playbook: it forces a mass password reset for the affected users in the Identity and Access Management (IAM) system, opens a ticket in the incident management system, and sends an automated security awareness notification to the exposed employees, ensuring a swift and automated defense against credential harvesting and account takeover.