Darkreading.com reported that a “new study shows that in 2021 more organizations experienced at least one successful email-based phishing attack than the year before. There were also more opportunistic and targeted phishing attacks last year compared with 2020, as well as phishing attacks involving ransomware and business email compromise (BEC).” The February 22, 2022 report entitled “More Orgs Suffered Successful Phishing Attacks in 2021 Than in 2020” included these comments about a recent Proofpoint study in which “Proofpoint recently analyzed data from a survey of 600 IT and security professionals an another survey of 3,500 employees from seven countries, including the US, UK, France, Germany, and Australia';
The researchers also analyzed data gathered from some 100 million simulated phishing attacks and more than 15 million emails that end users at Proofpoint's customers reported as being suspicious.
The study shows that in 2021, 83% of organizations experienced a successful email-based phishing attack in which a user was tricked into risky action, such as clicking a bad link, downloading malware, providing credentials, and executing a wire transfer.
That number is a startling 46% increase over 2020.
No surprises in this report!
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The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
