ZDNet reports that IT, health care and manufacturing organizations received the highest number of phishing emails in a one-month period.
Avanan's 1H 2021 Global Phish Cyber Attack Report found that attackers have been launching numerous attacks against the said industries due to their use of outdated technology and their abundance of collected data, according to researchers. The report also showed that phishing accounted for nearly 5% of all emails, most of which involved credential harvesting or impersonation.
Meanwhile, phishing attacks targeted non-executive accounts 77% more, compared with other accounts, while about 52% of impersonation emails claimed to be from an enterprise non-executive account.
"There are a few reasons behind this. One, security admins might be spending a lot of time providing extra attention to the C-Suite and hackers have adjusted. Two, non-executives still hold sensitive information and have access to financial data. There is no need to go all the way up the food chain," said Avanan researchers.
Jill Aitoro is senior vice president of content strategy for CyberRisk Alliance. She has more than 20 years of experience editing and reporting on technology, business and policy. Prior to joining CRA, she worked at Sightline Media as editor of Defense News and executive editor of the Business-to-Government Group. She previously worked at Washington Business Journal and Nextgov, covering federal technology, contracting and policy, as well as CMP Media’s VARBusiness and CRN and Penton Media’s iSeries News.
New security vulnerabilities discovered last year reached 24,096, which was 25% higher than in 2021 and the largest growth since 2017, indicating the accelerated increase in security flaw prevalence, according to SiliconAngle.
Suspected Vietnamese hacking operation XE Group, also known as XeThanh, which has been targeting healthcare organizations, government agencies, and construction firms since at least 2013, had one of its operators identified as Nguyen Huu Tai, according to The Hacker News.