What Phishing Tricks Do Employees Mostly Fall for?
Phishing is the scourge of business cybersecurity. The precursor to many devastating cyberattacks like ransomware, account takeover and business email compromise.
Untrained employees are a massive security risk because they’re highly likely to fall for the most common cyber threat they’ll face: phishing. An estimated 97% of users are unable to detect a sophisticated phishing email.
These 2021 trends underpin the business email security picture right now and lay the foundation for future challenges that organizations will face.
Phishing-Related Cybercrime is Booming
- Business email compromise losses increased 28%
- Ransomware attacks and losses grew over 50%
- Social media-related phishing attacks grew more than 80%
- Brand impersonation and spoofing was 15 times higher in 2021 than in 2020
- Total cybercrime losses increased by almost 50%
Phishing paved the way for other damaging cyberattacks
- An estimated 84% of businesses said they were the victims of a successful phishing attack.
- About 59% of organizations that fell victim to a phishing attack were then infected with ransomware.
- Just over 40% of network intrusions in 2021were facilitated by phishing.
As you can see from the real phishing simulation data we’ve delivered above, brand impersonation, misrepresentation or spoofing is a tremendously effective way for the bad guys to get the job done. The Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report 2021 shows the rapid rise of brand impersonation, called Misrepresentation in this report.
The 10 Most Impersonated Brands
- DHL 23%
- Microsoft 20%
- WhatsApp 11%
- Google 10%
- LinkedIn 8%
- Amazon 4%
- Roblox 3%
- FedEx 3%
- PayPal 2%
- Apple 2%
Why does this keep happening? Even knowing about the risk of data loss via email, most organizations do not have adequate training in place to educate employees about data handling and email safety. If your business is in need pacific IT can help Contact us today or book a discovery session.