The Egress Threat Intelligence team has detected an 83.6% increase in scouting phishing emails between May 1st – June 30, 2023, compared with March 1st – April 30th, 2023. These emails aim to identify organizations’ and individuals’ personal time off (PTO) patterns or other absences from work through the automatic out-of-office responses they receive. The scouting attacks were sent from multiple spoofed email addresses from servers located in Russia and Japan.

Almost every organization freely admits that people are the biggest risk to its security. This year’s Data Breach Investigations Report by Verizon highlights that 74% of incidents involved the human element. People are a ‘soft’ target for cybercriminals. Networks and software can only be exploited if pre-existing vulnerabilities are discovered and hacked before they’re patched. People, however, can be engineered into creating vulnerability at any time.

Every employee in an organization has access to email, creating a vulnerability that cybercriminals seek to exploit through phishing attacks. There are many different types of phishing attacks that bad actors use to achieve their goals, and it is important to have the right processes and security solutions in place to prevent employees from falling victim.

A fat finger error is a keyboard input mistake that results in the wrong information being transmitted. The term originated in financial trading markets and is now used more broadly in the security industry to describe data breaches that are caused by human error, particularly when the breach is attributed to mistyped information, like an email address. There are few people who have not experienced the sinking feeling caused by making a fat finger error.