I saw a presentation from the company BrightTALK that works in cybersecurity talking about the rise of a cybersecurity attack known as phishing. For those who do not know what phishing is, it is an attack where someone impersonates somebody else to steal information, usually through the usage of communication methods like phone calls, emails, and text messages/messaging software. According to this talk that was first presented on March 23rd, 2022, phishing attacks have been going up this year with a five hundred percent increase in the average number of phishing attacks occurring between January and February of 2020. This is a strange occurrence since phishing attacks usually go down during the New Year. This increase and a secondary increase between September and October 2020 were historic increases in phishing attacks that usually do not happen around this time during regular intervals. Many believe the COVID-19 pandemic is responsible for this increase. To get more information on this phenomenon, Carbonite + Webroot (another tech company) did a survey with IDG Research company including many people, companies, and over three hundred global IT executives in order to get more data on how phishing is affecting people and what can hopefully be done to counteract phishing.
One part of the data shows that people are most likely to impersonate certain companies to get information from people. According to the survey in 2021, here are the companies that were most impersonated in phishing attacks from most impersonated major companies to least: Steam, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, La Banque Postale, Paypal, HSBCC, and Yahoo. Ninety-three percent of tech executives that were talked to where concerned about phishing attacks and seventy six percent of respondents say the number of phishing attacks they have to deal with are still going up compared to what they had to deal with before the COVID-19 pandemic happened. According to thirty-seven percent of respondents, the downtime after a phishing attack is more than twenty-four hours or a single day. Different types of phishing attacks tend to be more likely to affect certain areas of the world than others. According forty-eight percent of the respondents in North America stated that they had to regularly deal with phishing attempts involving malware. Meanwhile, thirty-two percent of Asian-Pacific Islander respondents are victims of a man-in-the-middle attack.
This kind of attack, also known as a MITM attack for short, is an attack where an attacker finds a way to act as a ‘middle man’ to intercept messages in transit between a sender & a receiver. Thirty-five percent of European respondents say DNS poisoning is the major phishing attack they deal with. This attack is also known as DNS spoofing. This form of attack alters a domain name system (or DNS) of a network to cause a victim to go to a bad website filled with malware instead of the victim’s intended destination.
According to all of the applicants, search engine and clone phishing attacks are some of the hardest kinds of phishing attacks to avoid. On top of that, forty-four percent of applicants said they got tricked by phishing attacks where said attacker used an email attachment with malware to infect computer systems. A lot of this information and this article so far explains the kind of phishing attacks that can harm people, but there are harsh real-world consequences for these dangerous cyber attacks that most seem to overlook. Seventy-five percent of applicants said they suffered some kind of bad consequence after a phishing attack, including things like lost productivity, having to pay legal or regulatory fines, suffered downtime that lasted longer than a day, and exposure of sensitive data. Hiring freezes and budget cuts have hurt the ability of many companies to get the right people to fight against cybersecurity threats like phishing. All of these problems lead to phishing being a problem that will continue in the near future...