2020 Phishing Trends Report

Phishers never stop, they use any language to trick their victim, and today the COVID-19 pandemic is no exception, they continuously seek to benefit from this crisis. Also, nearly a third of all breaches in 2019 involved phishing, according to the 2019 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report. Despite many measures, like awareness training and phishing tests, organisations still continue to be vulnerable to phishing attacks.

Cybercriminals target particular jobs and departments in different industries, connected to their purposes. For instance, they usually send phishing emails containing macro Ransomware to the HR employees or Consulting firms who have to deal with certain attachments. Therefore, these people are more likely to open the attachments than the others who do not regularly get emails with attached documents.

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.”

Purpose of the report is to render insight into the vulnerability of corporations on a department and industry basis. The report sheds light and provides clarity on which departments and industries are more prone to phishing attacks. This report will enable organisations to gain a better understanding of vulnerable departments and industries. The results indicated that the employees who deal with large quantities of data are likely to fall for phishing emails like the last years’ result.