As workers transition to home positions, they are putting their businesses at risk. Enter spear phishing: the new normal, with criminals are using this channel to send with 6.5 billion fraudulent emails sent every day.
“Spear phishing” describes when phishing is done with specific targets in mind; this allows messages to these people to appear more legitimate, or as if they are being sent by a legitimate user. For example, a person may get an offer from an organization that he knows. He might click on it and provide confidential information, perhaps to log-in to the website. In reality, the message is not from the actual organization, and he has given his credentials to the actual site to the spear-phisher.
According to the FBI, overall phishing incidents rose 12X in the past five years. The shift to home offices brought an increase in shadow IT, with unapproved devices, software, and poorly secured networks, has increasing vulnerability to spear phishing.
Additionally, the general state of anxiety brought on by the pandemic, and shifts in the work environment with remote projects, have created massive increases in online payments fraud, which has become the massive target of spear phishing, and created massive increases in invoice fraud.
With that, the prevalence of social media, the Dark Web, and better organized cyber-criminal syndicates also have contributed to the ease in carrying out these strikes.
Below are some data points on the overall prevalence and impact:
- Financial institutions are the target in 4 out of 10 phishing attacks.
- Spear phishing strikes averaged $80,000 in losses during Q4 2020.
- They were also the leading delivery method for targeted attacks.
- Last year, phishing complaints to the FBI rose by 110% over the prior year.
Preventing invoice fraud and spear phishing from reaching your business becomes essential.
Read Fraud.net’s comprehensive report on spear phishing’s biggest cases of 2020, and learn ways to protect your own business.
Whitney Anderson is an Entrepreneurial CEO with over 25 years of experience in technology, digital commerce, and applied AI/machine learning. Whitney is passionate about building fast-growth companies and driving game-changing value for large organizations. Whitney began his career in international finance, then was recruited by Kroll Associates, a specialist in complex and large-scale fraud.For the last 17 years, Whitney has been building technology startups to solve big, difficult problems, most recently as CEO and co-founder of Fraud.net, an AI-powered enterprise fraud detection, prevention, and analysis platform.
