Defender’s Guide to Phishing published by Red Canary and MITRE ATT&CK provides enterprises with a practical view of phishing defense tactics observed across large enterprise environments. The Defender’s Guide to Phishing explains how adversaries leverage credential harvesting, OAuth token abuse, and malicious file lures to evade detection systems. Using ATT&CK mappings, the guide outlines common attacker behaviors during email compromise and provides playbooks for detecting these techniques within endpoint telemetry and network traffic. For security teams, the Defender’s Guide to Phishing emphasizes visibility into email gateway logs, behavioral analytics for document downloads, and detection of OAuth token misuse, a growing vector in cloud-based phishing attacks. The publication stresses that defenders must combine layered email security with behavioral detection to catch adversaries operating post-delivery. It also promotes the integration of MITRE ATT&CK mapping into SIEMs and EDR platforms to ensure coverage alignment. Enterprises facing persistent phishing campaigns should integrate the Defender’s Guide to Phishing into ongoing security awareness, detection engineering, and response training. Mapping detection logic to ATT&CK enables defenders to identify visibility gaps and develop durable countermeasures against credential-based intrusions.
🎯CORTEX Protocol Intelligence Assessment
Business Impact: Phishing remains the most prevalent initial-access vector in enterprise environments, making proactive detection and user-level awareness essential to prevent credential theft, data exfiltration, and ransomware staging. The Defender’s Guide to Phishing helps security teams benchmark their detection maturity and close gaps before attackers exploit them. Technical Context: Red Canary and MITRE ATT&CK analysts derived phishing behavior chains from hundreds of enterprise incidents, highlighting OAuth token compromise, malicious macro abuse, and MFA fatigue as leading persistence techniques. Organizations can implement the guide’s recommended log sources and ATT&CK coverage validation to improve early-stage detection and reduce response times.
⚡Strategic Intelligence Guidance
- Use MITRE ATT&CK coverage mapping to identify missing phishing-related detections in SIEM and EDR environments.
- Correlate OAuth token creation events with identity provider logs to flag suspicious access without user interaction.
- Enable attachment sandboxing and URL rewriting at the mail gateway level to reduce exposure to malicious payloads.
- Educate users continuously on MFA fatigue attacks and OAuth consent abuse through targeted training simulations.
Threats
PhishingOAuth token abuseCredential theft
Targets
Enterprise employeesCloud identity systems