Social Engineering Attacks are on the rise. Current research reveals some key takeaways about how these attacks are evolving and how cybercriminals are now targeting smaller businesses, hoping it will give them a better chance at successfully compromising accounts and wreaking further havoc. As these cybercriminals step up social engineering attacks, organizations of all sizes need to be prepared for spear-phishing attacks.
Here is an in-depth look at key findings:
- An average employee of a small business with less than 100 employees will experience 350% more social engineering attacks than an employee of a larger enterprise.
- Conversation hijacking grew almost 270% in 2021.
- 51% of social engineering attacks are phishing.
- Microsoft is the most impersonated brand, used in 57% of phishing attacks.
- 1 in 5 organizations had an account compromised in 2021.
- Cybercriminals compromised approximately 500,000 Microsoft 365 accounts in 2021.
- 1 in 3 malicious logins into compromised accounts came from Nigeria.
- Cybercriminals sent out 3 million messages from 12,000 compromised accounts.
There are five distinct categories of social engineering attacks - business email compromise, phishing impersonation attacks, extortion attacks, scamming attacks, and conversation hijacking. Below are further details about each of these attacks.
Business email compromise, or simply BEC, attacks usually involve impersonating an individual inside or outside an organization. In 2021, these attacks made up 9% of all the socially engineered attacks, roughly the same as the year before. But, they are grabbing a more significant share of headlines.. click the link below to continue
