4 out of 10 Phishing Emails Are Despatched From a Compromised E mail Account

Evaluation of phishing emails within the second quarter of this yr paints an image of what safety groups and vigilant recipients ought to count on from trendy phishing assaults.

Within the 2024 Phishing Menace Developments report from Egress (a KnowBe4 firm), we be taught that phishing assaults have elevated by 28% over a single quarter this yr. So, this stays a key focus for safety groups. 

However we additionally get an replace of what sorts of particular strategies are being utilized in phishing emails, laying out a roadmap for what safety options and customers ought to be watching out for:

• 44% of phishing emails had been despatched from a compromised account – keep in mind, this seemingly implies that the compromised account, too, was phished in a credential harvesting rip-off, solely compounding the phishing drawback
• Payloads range – 45% of phishing emails comprise a hyperlink-based payload, whereas 23% embrace malicious attachments, and 20% rely solely on social engineering
• In impersonation assaults, 36% of them used hyperlinks, 45% used attachments, and 15% used social engineering solely
• And the largest purple flag for me is the truth that workers solely precisely report phishing emails 29% of the time

Menace actors proceed to make use of a variety of strategies to trick customers into participating. However the one thread all through is using social engineering, whether or not it’s impersonating somebody the sufferer is aware of or utilizing a compromised account. These are all strategies to ascertain credibility to get the sufferer recipient to click on, open, or reply to a phishing electronic mail, one thing we train in our new-school safety consciousness coaching.

Phishing seems to be prefer it’s not going anyplace, so empowering your workers to cease assaults as an alternative of aiding them can considerably scale back the danger of profitable cyber assaults.

KnowBe4 empowers your workforce to make smarter safety choices day-after-day. Over 70,000 organizations worldwide belief the KnowBe4 platform to strengthen their safety tradition and scale back human danger.