Monitoring of traffic to phishing pages hosted on the free hosting service Cloudflare R2 show an unheard of spike of 6100%, many going undetected by many security solutions due to the evasive techniques used. I can’t remember a time when I’ve covered a story and the reported increases were as large as the recent spike in malicious network traffic observed by Netskope.

After you come to grips with the massive average cost of a data breach to an enterprise organization measured in the millions, it’s time to look at the factors that increase – and lower – that cost. According to IBM’s recently-released 18th edition of their Cost of a Data Breach Report, we find that this year’s average cost is $4.45 million. That’s a staggering number, but what about the contributing factors?

Phishing attacks are on the rise in Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reports. “The latest figures reveal phishing is a practice that is only becoming more and more widespread,” the ABC says.“Phishing was the most reported scam to Scamwatch in 2022, with the government website recording 74,573 complaints — a 4.6 per cent increase on the previous year.

Kroll’s Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) team has been tracking an uptick in phishing campaigns utilizing open redirects. Open redirects are vulnerabilities commonly found on websites that allow for the manipulation of legitimate URLs, which actors can leverage to redirect users to arbitrary external URLs. They occur when a website allows for user-supplied input as part of a URL parameter in a redirect link, without proper validation or sanitization.

New analysis of the second quarter of this year makes it clear that individuals and organizations alike are at an increasing risk of web- and email-based scams.

In cybersecurity, knowledge is everything. From APT intelligence to zero-day vulnerabilities, relevant and timely information can be the difference between a thwarted attack and a total disaster. With Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks at their zenith, there has never been a better time for a comprehensive BEC report. As such, Fortra has released its 2023 BEC Trends, Targets, and Changes in Techniques Report.

From February to July 2023, Netskope Threat Labs has been tracking a staggering 61-fold increase in traffic to phishing pages hosted in Cloudflare R2. The majority of the phishing campaigns target Microsoft login credentials, although there are some pages targeting Adobe, Dropbox, and other cloud apps. The attacks have been targeting victims mainly in North America and Asia, across different segments, led by the technology, financial services, and banking sectors.

We previously reported independently on PDF-based phishing attacks skyrocketing and the rise of SEO attacks. A recent research study found that the combination of both is quite common. Most worryingly, PDF-based SEO attacks are poorly detected by common defense mechanisms such as blocklists, ad blockers or even crowdsourced antivirus services VirusTotal. PDF-based attacks can be anything from a website embedded in a PDF file to an email.

A whaling attack is a type of phishing attack that targets senior executives. The act of whaling is usually perpetrated via email and involves deceiving victims into initiating actions that put the organization and its assets at risk. In this blog, we explore how a whaling attack works, why executives are targeted, examples of successful whaling attacks, and steps you can take to prevent them.

The latest data from Comcast Business’ analysis of over 23.5 billion cyber attacks on their business customers shows the importance and role of phishing in attacks. Over the years there has been a consistent mantra, where everyone agrees that “90-something” percent of cyber attacks start with phishing. There have been plenty of sources that corroborate this using percentages in the 90th percentile, but the overall message is phishing is your greatest Initial Access tactic.