PHISHING REMAINS MOST DOMINANT INTERNET CRIME - CLOUDFLARE

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 16 (Bernama) -- Cloudflare Inc has released its inaugural 2023 Phishing Threats Report highlighting that phishing remains the most dominant and fastest growing Internet crime, largely due to the ubiquity of email and the ceaseless issue of human error that is preyed upon by today’s threat actors.

Its Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Matthew Prince said phishing is an epidemic that has permeated into the farthest corners of the Internet, preying on trust and victimising everyone from CEOs to government officials to the everyday consumer.

“Email messages and malicious links are nefarious partners in crime when it comes to the most common form of Internet threats.

“Organisations of all sizes need a Zero Trust solution that encompasses email security - when this is neglected, they are leaving themselves exposed to the largest vector in today's threat landscape,” he said in a statement.

While business email compromise (BEC) losses have topped US$50 billion, corporate organisations are not the only victims that attackers are after, as the real implications of phishing go beyond Fortune 500’s and global companies, extending to small and local organisations as well as the public sector. (US$1=RM4.64)

Regardless of an organisation's size, industry or sector, the report revealed that threat actors who leverage phishing campaigns have two major objectives, which are to achieve authenticity and legitimacy in the eyes of the victim, and to persuade victims to engage or click.

These objectives are underscored by the key findings of the report, including malicious links were the most prevalent threat category, comprising 35.6 per cent of detected threats while, one-third (30 per cent) of detected threats featured newly registered domains, were the second most common threat category.

Other findings indicated that identity deception threats are on the rise. Attackers posed as more than 1,000 different organisations in over one billion brand impersonation attempts, with Microsoft, one of the most trusted software companies, being the most impersonated brand.

The report is a culmination of data intelligence and security trends gathered from the 112 billion threats, with an evaluation on more than 279 million email threat indicators, 250 million malicious messages, over one billion instances of brand impersonation, and other data points gathered from approximately 13 billion emails processed between May 2022 to May 2023.

Additionally, this report is informed by a Cloudflare-commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, in which it surveyed 316 security decision-makers across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia Pacific about the state of phishing, between January 2023 and February 2023.

-- BERNAMA