Description

Detects messages impersonating government and tax authorities (such as the IRS, SSA, Department of Treasury, and similar agencies) that contain suspicious document-related links. The rule identifies either download calls-to-action pointing to low-reputation or free subdomain hosts, or phishing-kit URLs that embed the impersonated organization's name in the path. Credential theft intent is confirmed via NLP analysis, and trusted sender domains are only flagged when DMARC authentication fails.

References

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Sublime Security
Created Jul 14th, 2026 • Last updated Jul 14th, 2026
Source
type.inbound
// impersonates a named government / tax / benefits authority in the sender display name
and regex.icontains(strings.replace_confusables(sender.display_name),
                    'internal revenue|\bIRS\b|social security|\bSSA\b|medicaid|medicare|department of (?:health|revenue|treasur|state|labor|justice|homeland)|ministry of finance|income tax (?:department|dept)|department of the treasury|u\.?s\.? treasury'
)
// a document lure link that is either a download cta to a low-rep host
and any(body.current_thread.links,
        regex.icontains(.display_text,
                        'download|response form|review document|official document|statement'
        )
        and (
          .href_url.domain.root_domain not in $tranco_1m
          or .href_url.domain.root_domain in $url_shorteners
          or (
            .href_url.domain.subdomain is not null
            and .href_url.domain.subdomain != "www"
            and .href_url.domain.root_domain in $free_subdomain_hosts
          )
        )
)
and any(ml.nlu_classifier(body.current_thread.text).intents,
        .name == "cred_theft" and .confidence in ("medium", "high")
)
// negate highly trusted sender domains unless they fail DMARC authentication
and not (
  sender.email.domain.root_domain in $high_trust_sender_root_domains
  and coalesce(headers.auth_summary.dmarc.pass, false)
)
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