2017 Phishing Campaign Review

2017 was a record year for security incidents and data breaches. Phishing has become a huge threat to businesses and consumers worldwide and the number of recorded phishing attacks continues to grow exponentially. It is predicted that by 2020 phishing will be the number one cyber-threat to your organisation.

As shown by Verizon’s 2016 Data Breach InvestigationsReport (2), 30% of phishing emails are opened soon after receipt, and about 12% of recipients go on to click suspicious links or attachments.

Additionally, “The median time for the first user of a phishing campaign to open the malicious email is 1minute, 40 seconds. The median time to the first clic kon the attachment was 3 minutes, 45 seconds.”

Phishers exploit the human factor to break the security chain. In the words of Janet Brum field of Verizon Enterprise Solutions, cybercriminals “exploit human nature as they rely on familiar attack patterns .”Phishing attacks are successful because they target natural human responses, like the urge to open correspondence from a friend, or at their trusted work account (3).