Phishing analysis helps organizations determine whether suspicious emails represent real threats and what actions to take in response. As phishing attacks grow more frequent and evasive, security teams must assess emails quickly to prevent credential theft, malware infections, and business disruption.
Automated phishing analysis extends these capabilities by removing the manual, time-consuming tasks required to investigate emails and initiate response actions.
ThreatConnect’s automated phishing analysis enables teams to reduce remediation time, strengthen their security posture, and stay ahead of evolving phishing threats.
What Is Phishing?
Phishing is a deceptive social engineering technique used to steal sensitive data or deploy malware. Its primary purpose is to trick a user into revealing credentials, executing malicious code, or making an unauthorized payment.
Attacks frequently use emails as a delivery mechanism for malware, using malicious attachments or links to deploy ransomware, spyware, or other hostile code onto the network.
Phishing analysis is the systematic process of dissecting these threats to determine their intent, origin, and potential impact.
This analysis serves to extract Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) and understand the attacker’s tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), which provides actionable intelligence for defense.
The Core Components of Phishing Analysis
A methodical approach to phishing analysis helps teams handle threats efficiently and effectively.
- Triage and Prioritization
The first step is to sort the high volume of reported emails by severity. Automated scoring and initial heuristic checks help separate credible threats from common spam, allowing analysts to focus their efforts on the most urgent alerts. - Header and Origin Analysis
Once a suspicious email is isolated, analysts inspect its headers to determine if it could be a spoof. This involves checking for Return-Path mismatches, analyzing the reputation of the source IP address, and verifying email authentication results for Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), as well as Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC). - Payload Investigation
The payload is the malicious component of the email. Analysts must analyze attachments and URLs in a controlled environment to identify malicious intent without exposing the host network. This includes detonating files in a sandbox to observe their behavior or using reputation services to check the destination of embedded links. - Enrichment and Context
Finally, analysts extract artifacts from the email — like IP addresses, domain names, and file hashes — and cross-reference them with threat intelligence feeds. This enrichment process helps determine if the indicators are part of a known threat actor’s campaign or infrastructure, providing crucial context for the response.
The Benefits of Phishing Analysis
Performing deep analysis provides several advantages, including:
- Proactive threat neutralization: Analysis transforms a single email from a reactive alert into proactive intelligence. The extracted IOCs can be used to update firewalls, gateways, and other security tools to block future attacks before they launch.
- Reduced mean time to respond (MTTR): A structured analysis process allows teams to identify and dismiss false positives quickly. This frees up analysts to focus their time and resources on investigating and remediating confirmed threats.
- Reduced organizational risk: Efficient analysis workflows minimize the threat of data breaches, financial loss, and reputational damage stemming from successful phishing attacks.
- Enhanced security operations: By linking individual artifacts to broader attack patterns, security leaders can better understand who is targeting their organization and why. This strategic insight helps inform long-term defensive priorities and resource allocation. Specifically, it can be used to strengthen security controls, patch vulnerabilities, and provide targeted employee training.
Why Manual Phishing Analysis Falls Short
The sheer volume of phishing attempts makes manual review impractical for the modern Security Operations Center (SOC). It’s time-consuming and can lead to alert fatigue, where the constant stream of notifications causes missed threats, analyst burnout, and increased organizational risk.
Phishing analysis software introduces a standardized workflow to automate slow, repetitive tasks and close the gap between raw email volume and effective incident response.
Why Trust ThreatConnect?
ThreatConnect is a recognized leader in Threat Intelligence Operations (TI Ops) and security orchestration and automation. Hundreds of the world’s largest global enterprises, including 41 Fortune 100 companies, rely on our award-winning Platform to power effective, automated phishing analysis at scale.
Our team brings decades of experience across threat intelligence analysis, cyber risk management, security operations, and software engineering. This expertise is built into phishing analysis software that enables fast, accurate investigations, reduces workload, and protects critical infrastructure from sophisticated threats. Our Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) provides a unified approach to proactive, intelligence-driven defense.
Automate Your Defense With ThreatConnect
ThreatConnect automates the entire phishing analysis workflow. The Platform programmatically ingests suspicious emails from user-reporting mailboxes, automatically parses them to extract malicious indicators, enriches those indicators against internal and external threat intelligence, and executes response playbooks.
This allows security teams to block malicious domains at the firewall, quarantine infected endpoints, and neutralize threats across their environment without requiring direct human intervention.
Reduce your phishing response time from hours to minutes with ThreatConnect’s Automated Phishing Analysis. Contact us today to request a demo.