Email Marketing Trick Incorporated in Hacking Arsenals

Pixel tracking, a technique often used by email marketing platforms, has made its way into the arsenal of hacking tricks used by threat actors to probe and map a company's internal network.

The technique of "pixel tracking" refers to embedding a 1x1 pixel at the end of emails hosted on the sender's server. As email recipients open the email or forward it to colleagues, the email client loads the image, making a request to the sender's server, who logs the data and uses it for email marketing analytics.

The technique is very efficient because some email clients, especially Web clients, will automatically load images when opening an email.

Most desktop email applications block this operation, but users will allow the images to load, thinking there's a bigger photo somewhere in the email they'll need to view.

Pixel tracking used for network mapping

Hackers have discovered that they can also implement pixel tracking in emails they send to a target t...