SAN FRANCISCO – Q1 Phishers’ Favourite Report released by Vade Secure has shown that various social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram are highly preferred by cybercriminals to carry out phishing attack. Vade Secure, the global leader in predictive email defense while publishing its report stated that there was an increase of 74.7 percent in phishing attacks this quarter. The report highlighted that Facebook and Instagram enjoy 10th and 24th spot respectively on the Phishers’ favorites list. Also, cybercriminals use complicated tactics to target Office 365 and Corporate Email Users on a large scale.
As millions of Facebook users’ passwords and emails are stored by Facebook in a plain text, this gives hackers an opportunity to take the confusion of users to make them click on phishing pages. Also, the report revealed that various new tactics are used to carry out the phishing attack on Instagram. In the March month earlier this year, Instagram phishing tricked users by offering them a verified Instagram badge in exchange for supplying their credentials. After this, many companies started employee phishing training at their organization to spread information about phishing awareness tips.
Microsoft is the most attacked brand which has witnessed the highest number of phishing attacks like the previous three quarters. It is because of its the lucrativeness of Office365 credentials and its single entry allows hackers to carry out multi-phased attacks easily. The company also working on providing phishing awareness training to its employees and users. Cybercriminals keep on evolving their attacking techniques and hence it has become quite challenging to detect phishing attack easily. Email phishing training would help to some extent but awareness in phishing industry needs to be provided on a large scale in order to prevent such phishing attacks.
