FEATURE
attackers are tricking their targets by
posing as trusted senders and brands,
getting them to hand over login details,
personal information and money.
Phishing attacks are still growing, with
impersonation attacks growing even faster.
“We also advocate threat hunting
to internal email traffic, enabling
organisations to detect, analyse,
remediate and extract bad things out of
their email networks.
Combining these capabilities with a
stronger human firewall through dynamic
user awareness training and testing
programs ensures that an organisation’s
internal network, made up of people
and machines, is robust and capable of
defending itself against malicious attacks.
“Finally, it’s important that brands
monitor their domains from being
explicitly spoofed so that customers can
maintain trust in companies with which
they are conducting business.”
The ‘Human Factor’
Meanwhile, Proofpoint, a leading
cybersecurity and compliance company,
announced its annual Human Factor
report findings, which highlight the ways
in which cybercriminals target people,
rather than systems and infrastructure,
to install malware, initiate fraudulent
transactions, steal data and more. The
report, based on an 18-month analysis of
data collected across Proofpoint’s global
customer base, spotlights attack trends to
help organisations and users stay safe.
Proofpoint’s 2019 Human Factor report
findings include:
• More than 99% of threats observed
required human interaction
to execute. Enabling a macro,
opening a file, following a link or
opening a document – signifying the
importance of social engineering to
enable successful attacks
• Microsoft lures remain a staple.
Nearly one in four phishing emails
sent in 2018 were associated with
Microsoft products. 2019 saw a shift
towards cloud storage, DocuSign
and Microsoft cloud service phishing
in terms of effectiveness. The top
38
phishing lures were focused on
credential theft, creating feedback
loops that potentially inform future
attacks, lateral movement, internal
phishing and more.
• Threat actors are refining their
tools and techniques in search
of financial gain and information
theft. While one-to-one attacks and
one-to-many attacks were more
common when impostor attacks
first began to emerge, threat actors
are finding success in attacks
using more than five identities
against more than five individuals in
targeted organisations
Email attacks: Verticals at risk Organisations need
to know exactly
who is being
targeted and why
– so they can tailor
their prevention
and protection
programmes
accordingly.
• Education, finance and
advertising/marketing topped the
industries with the highest average
attack index, an aggregated
measure of attack severity and
risk. The education sector is frequently targeted with attacks of
the highest severity and has one
of the highest average number of
Very Attacked People (VAPs) across
Issue 19
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