Compromised email account used to send over 1,000 phishing messages to contacts

A small company's office worker received a link in an email that appeared to come from a long-time business contact, and entered her login details on a fake sign-in page. Attackers then used her account to access past correspondence and send more than 1,000 phishing emails inside and outside the organization. The messages came from her real address, making them hard for recipients to recognize as fraudulent. The company reset her password, notified affected contacts, and considered introducing multi-factor authentication. The case is based on a 2020 first-half incident reported to the Information-technology Promotion Agency, Japan (IPA), which describes this method as lateral phishing.