Disguised executable files in spear-phishing emails: Detecting the point of entry in advanced persistent threat

In recent years, cyber attacks have caused substantial financial losses and been able to stop fundamental public services. Among the serious attacks, Advanced Persistent threat (APT) has emerged as a big challenge to the cyber security hitting selected companies and organisations. The main objectives of APT are data exfiltration and intelligence appropriation. As part of the APT life cycle, an attacker creates a Point of Entry (PoE) to the target network. This is usually achieved by installing malware on the targeted machine to leave a back-door open for future access. A common technique employed to breach into the network, which involves the use of social engineering, is the spear phishing email. These phishing emails may contain disguised executable files. This paper presents the disguised executable file detection (DeFD) module, which aims at detecting disguised exe files transferred over the network connections. The detection is based on a comparison between the MIME type of the transferred file and the file name extension. This module was experimentally evaluated and the results show a successful detection of disguised executable files.