With the COVID-19 outbreak, cybercriminals have adapted quite quickly to the ongoing events and started implementing new malicious techniques.
The guys and gals at Barracuda have spent months upon months analysing spear-phishing attacks. Finally, they have released an in-depth report into the spear-phishing threats and trends.
A few key takeaways from the Spear-Phishing: Top Threats and Trends Vol.5 report –
- 12% of spear-phishing attacks are business email compromise (BEC) attacks
- 71% of spear-phishing attacks include at least one malicious URL in the email body, however, only 30% of BEC attacks include a link
- 72% of COVID-19-related attacks between June and October 2020 are scamming attacks followed by phishing (18%), extortion (6%) and BEC (3%)
- 13% of spear-phishing attacks originate from internally compromised accounts
- the most common domain extension used for malicious URLs is .com (71%)
The report also outlines 13 email threat types organisations have to face and they are –
For further details, download the free copy of the report here.