- Cisco Talos says hackers abuse css IE emails
- Stilsheet -Sloget is used to hide content, trace people’s behavior and more
- Researchers suggest that team adopt advanced filtering techniques
Cyber criminals use CSS IE emails to track their victims, learn more about them and redirect them into phishing sites, experts have warned.
CyberSecurity scientists at Cisco Talos outlined how CSS (Cascading -style sheet) is used IE emails to control design, layout and formatting of E -mail content. Companies use it not only to make E emails look better, but also to keep the layout consistent across different E -mail clients. There is nothing inherently malicious about CSS, but as is the case with many other legitimate tools, it is abused in attack.
“The available features of CSS allow attackers and spammers to track users’ actions and preferences, although several features related to dynamic content (eg JavaScript) are limited IE email clients compared to web browsers,” a Cisco Talos researcher said in a report.
Advanced filtering techniques
Through CSS, cyber criminals can hide content in ordinary vision and thus bypass E email security solutions. They can also use it to redirect people into phishing pages, it was said. The tool can be used to monitor user behavior, which in turn can lead to spear phishing or fingerprint attacks.
“This abuse may vary from identifying the recipient’s font and color scheme preferences and client languages to even tracking their actions (eg viewing or printing e emails),” they said. “CSS delivers a wide range of rules and properties that can help spamers and threat actor fingerprint users, their webmail or email client and their system. For example, the media can record certain attributes in a user’s environment, including screen size, resolution and color depth.”
Cisco Talos said the new campaign is based on a “hidden text ‘Salting’ ‘, which they revealed at the end of January 2025.
To tackle this threat, the researchers suggested that the team adopt advanced filtration techniques that scan the structure of HTML -E emails, rather than just their content. Thus, an E -Mail security solution could look for extreme use of inline styles or CSS properties as “visibility: hidden”. It is also recommended to implement AI-driven defense.
Via Hacker the news
