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High Severity

Link: Self-sender with sender org in subject and credential theft indicator

Description

Detects messages where the sender and recipient are the same email address, containing organizational names in the subject, credential theft language with high confidence, and suspicious links. These messages often bypass traditional security measures by appearing to come from the recipient themselves.

References

No references.

Sublime Security
Created Dec 11th, 2025 • Last updated Dec 11th, 2025
Source
type.inbound
// self sender behavior
and length(recipients.to) == 1
and length(recipients.cc) == 0
and sender.email.email == recipients.to[0].email.email

// not self sender from the org_domain, this rule is not going to detect spoofed domains to limit FPs caused by various email auth issues.
and not sender.email.domain.domain in $org_domains

and profile.by_sender_email().prevalence == "new"

// org name in the subject, removing the subject from NLU to prevent the org being extracted from the subject
and any(filter(ml.nlu_classifier(body.current_thread.text, subject="").entities,
               .name == "org"
               and .text != sender.email.domain.sld
               and .text != sender.email.domain.domain
        ),
        // not an icontains, make it an exact match
        strings.contains(subject.base, .text)
)
// must contain a link
and 0 < length(body.current_thread.links) < 20

// cred theft
and any(ml.nlu_classifier(body.current_thread.text).intents,
        .name == "cred_theft" and .confidence == "high"
)
// all attachments are inline images or there are 0 attachments
and (
  length(attachments) == 0
  // there are only image attachments and all image attachments are served inline
  or (
    length(attachments) > 0
    and (
      all(attachments,
          .file_type in $file_types_images
          // all images are embedded in the html
          and strings.icontains(body.html.raw,
                                strings.concat('src="cid:', .content_id)
          )
      )
    )
  )
)
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