How does IONIX help prevent email hijacking?

IONIX discovers and monitors all email-related assets, validates exposures, and prioritizes remediation—reducing the risk of hijacked accounts or services being used in attacks.

What makes IONIX different from other ASM solutions?

IONIX’s ML-based discovery finds more assets with fewer false positives, and its Threat Exposure Radar helps teams focus on the most urgent issues. It also offers deep supply chain mapping and seamless integrations.

How quickly can IONIX be deployed?

Most customers are up and running within a week, with minimal resources required. Dedicated onboarding and support ensure a smooth start.

Is IONIX compliant with security standards?

Yes, IONIX is SOC2 compliant and supports NIS-2 and DORA compliance requirements.

What support is available?

Customers receive technical support, a dedicated account manager, and access to guides, tutorials, and regular review meetings.

Email Hijacking: Protect Yourself from Digital Supply Chain Attacks

By Nethanel Gelernter, Co-Founder and CTO | May 27, 2024

What is the Digital Supply Chain, and Why is it Risky?

The digital supply chain encompasses all third-party digital tools, services, and infrastructure your organization relies on—such as email platforms, cloud services, and SaaS applications. This interconnectedness introduces transitive risk: a compromise anywhere in the chain can cascade downstream, impacting your entire environment.

Key Risks: Web skimming, asset hijacking, mail hijacking, and nameserver hijacking.
Real-World Impact: Attackers exploit weak links to access sensitive data or launch phishing campaigns.

What is Mail Hijacking?

Mail hijacking occurs when attackers gain control of an email server or account—often via unpatched infrastructure or stolen credentials. They then use these assets to:

Send convincing phishing emails that bypass spam filters
Read sensitive communications
Conduct social engineering attacks

Hijacked email systems are especially dangerous because they leverage legitimate infrastructure, making detection and prevention more difficult.

Examples of Mail Hijacking

Third-Party Email Services

Organizations increasingly use shared cloud email services (e.g., Mailgun, Sendgrid). Attackers exploit these platforms to send phishing emails and mask their activities. For example, Chipotle’s marketing email was hijacked via a hacked Mailgun account, distributing phishing emails from a trusted domain.

Business Email Compromise (BEC)

BEC attacks use hijacked email accounts to send fake invoices or requests, tricking victims into transferring funds. In 2022, Microsoft reported attackers using AiTM (Attacker-in-The-Middle) techniques to bypass MFA, compromise Office 365 accounts, and alter invoices for financial fraud.

Mitigation: Locking Down Email

Implement and regularly audit SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to prevent spoofing.
Patch and secure all email infrastructure, especially self-hosted servers.
Adopt phishing-resistant MFA (e.g., FIDO2 tokens) to prevent account takeover via AiTM attacks.

However, once an account or service is compromised, traditional controls may be bypassed—making proactive asset discovery and risk management essential.

How IONIX Solves These Challenges

Comprehensive Asset Discovery: IONIX’s ML-based Connective Intelligence discovers all internet-facing assets—including shadow IT and third-party email services—ensuring nothing is overlooked.
Continuous Monitoring: IONIX tracks changes in your digital supply chain, alerting you to new risks or exposures as they emerge.
Risk Validation & Prioritization: The platform validates which assets are truly exploitable and prioritizes remediation based on severity and business context.
Streamlined Remediation: IONIX integrates with ticketing and SIEM/SOAR tools (e.g., Jira, ServiceNow, Splunk) to automate and accelerate response.
Supply Chain Mapping: Automatically maps dependencies, so you can see how a compromised email service could impact your broader environment.
Compliance Support: IONIX is SOC2 compliant and helps organizations align with NIS-2 and DORA regulations.

Learn more about IONIX integrations here.

FAQ: IONIX Value for Email & Supply Chain Security

How does IONIX help prevent email hijacking?: IONIX discovers and monitors all email-related assets, validates exposures, and prioritizes remediation—reducing the risk of hijacked accounts or services being used in attacks.
What makes IONIX different from other ASM solutions?: IONIX’s ML-based discovery finds more assets with fewer false positives, and its Threat Exposure Radar helps teams focus on the most urgent issues. It also offers deep supply chain mapping and seamless integrations.
How quickly can IONIX be deployed?: Most customers are up and running within a week, with minimal resources required. Dedicated onboarding and support ensure a smooth start.
Is IONIX compliant with security standards?: Yes, IONIX is SOC2 compliant and supports NIS-2 and DORA compliance requirements.
What support is available?: Customers receive technical support, a dedicated account manager, and access to guides, tutorials, and regular review meetings.

Customer Success Stories

E.ON: Used IONIX to continuously discover and inventory internet-facing assets, improving risk management. Read more.
Warner Music Group: Boosted operational efficiency and aligned security operations with business goals. Learn more.
Grand Canyon Education: Enhanced security by proactively discovering and remediating vulnerabilities. Details.

Conclusion & Next Steps

Email is a critical part of your digital supply chain. Understanding and monitoring all assets—first and third party—is essential to prevent hijacking and supply chain attacks. IONIX provides the visibility, validation, and remediation tools you need to stay ahead of evolving threats.

Request a scan to see your exposure.
Watch a short IONIX demo to see how easy it is to implement a CTEM program.
Explore technical documentation and resources.

Go back to All Blog posts

Email Hijacking – Protect Yourself From Supply Chain Attack

Nethanel Gelernter Co-Founder and CTO

May 27, 2024

In this article

What is the digital supply chain, and why is it risky?

The digital supply chain refers to the chain of third-party digital tools, services and infrastructure that your company depends on for a particular first-party service (such as your website or SaaS platform). In an ever-changing digital landscape, supply chains can be brittle with many unseen risks.

The nature of supply chain risk is transitive; any part of the often long and complicated digital supply chain can be compromised, causing all components downstream of it to also be compromised. This means the whole system is only as secure as its weakest link.

Some examples of significant digital supply risks are web skimming, asset hijacking, mail hijacking and nameserver hijacking. In this article we will go into the details of mail hijacking and how compromised mail servers can be abused to obtain sensitive information and send phishing emails.

What is mail hijacking?

Mail hijacking is the abuse of a compromised email server or service to further attack other victims. It most commonly occurs when first-party email servers are compromised (such as an unpatched on-premise Outlook server), or an account on a shared third party infrastructure (such as an email service platform) is hijacked via credential harvesting or phishing.

Attackers then abuse the hijacked asset to conduct more legitimate phishing attacks, bypass spam filtering, read sensitive emails and conduct more credible social engineering.

Examples of mail hijacking

Third-party email services

It’s becoming a more common practice for organizations to use shared cloud infrastructure with other companies to meet specific needs. Email is one of those examples: third party email sending services such as Mailgun and Sendgrid are used by many organizations.

Attackers are also following that trend and they are using third party email infrastructure to send phishing emails and hide their tracks. In one instance, Chipotle’s marketing email was hijacked via a hacked Mailgun account and used to dish out phishing emails impersonating Microsoft 365 and USAA (United Services Automobile Association) from mail.chipotle[.]com.

Business email compromise

One of the most prevalent and impactful attacks over email is BEC (Business Email Compromise), which sends legitimate-looking fake invoices to trick victims into paying a large amount of money to the attacker. The success rate of BEC largely depends on the legitimacy of the email, and there is nothing more realistic than using a hijacked mail system to deliver it straight from the trusted source.

In 2022, Microsoft uncovered a sophisticated financial fraud campaign in which attackers used a technique known as AiTM (Attacker-in-The-Middle) to bypass MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) and compromise Office 365 email accounts. Having compromised the email account, the attackers quickly started reading emails in the inbox for sensitive information as well as legitimately sent invoices with existing third parties; then they proceed to modify the invoices with their own payment details, and use the same legitimate inbox to send the BEC email.

Diagram showing a phishing attack workflow: An attacker sends a phishing email leading to a redirector page and then an AITM phishing page. Credentials and session cookies are stolen, allowing the attacker to authenticate and send a BEC campaign from within the target network to external recipients.

To the receiver of the invoice email, nothing would have changed but the payment details; it would not end up in spam or be flagged as phishing, since the email address is real and so are the rest of the email signatures, as the email was not spoofed. By hijacking an existing, legitimate email service and account, the attackers optimized the legitimacy of the BEC campaign to external recipients.

Mitigation: locking down email

While setting up and auditing your SPF, DKIM and DMARC headers for email security can thwart attackers spoofing fake emails using your organization’s domain, those controls go out the window once the attacker has compromised the account or service you use to send legitimate email. In this case, locking down any email-related service and infrastructure is paramount. If your email sending server is self hosted infrastructure exposed to the internet, ensure that it is patched promptly.

For locking down email accounts, implementing not just MFA, but phishing resistant MFA (such as FIDO authentication with physical tokens or virtual passkeys) is the only way to prevent the type of AiTM phishing attack used to take over mailboxes described above.

Conclusion

Email is an extremely important aspect of the digital supply chain, and knowing where and what your organization and its various departments use to send emails can help you track down risky first and third party assets. You can leverage attack surface management platforms like IONIX, which takes a proactive approach to identifying and mitigating risks posed by assets vulnerable to hijacking. To see IONIX in action, request a scan today.