Study shows most businesses are victims of phishing
Wombat Security has published an eye-opening report on the danger of phishing scams. One of the most alarming findings of the study is that more than 8 out of 10 businesses polled were victims of phishing attacks in 2015.
While the report doesn’t focus on what information may have been compromised by these scams, it goes to show that your data may not be quite as safe as you’d like with some businesses. Canadian Underwriter reports that about 25% of the polled organizations were in the finance industry, making them dangerous valuable targets for phishing.
Phishing relies on tricking someone to reveal private information. This could be with a malicious email link or false webpage, for example, you get an email from your bank saying to check your account activity because you may have been a victim of fraud. Before you think about it you click the link in the email and are taken to a web page that looks like the one you’re used to, but the url might be a little different.
The study showed that the four most effective types of phishing emails are
- Technical emails, such as delivery error reports
- Internal corporate emails
- Commercial emails such as shipping notices and money transfer reports
- Consumer emails, which impersonate social media notifications, gift card offers and the like
Consumer emails are the ones people are most accustomed to receiving and because of that they’re a little more cautious when opening them. The study says the best type for hooking people were those disguised as work emails, which probably explains why so many were compromised by phishing.
As the financial world increasingly moves to web-based platforms, the need for tight security becomes greater than ever.