“We’re in the middle of a cyber-crimewave where phishers and fraudsters take advantage of people at their most distracted,” said David Warburton, Senior EMEA Threat Research Evangelist, F5 Networks.
“It is prime season for individuals giving up credentials or inadvertently installing malware. Businesses are wrapping up end-of-year activities, key staff are on vacation, and record numbers of online holiday shoppers are searching for the best deals, looking for last-minute credit or feeling generous when charities come calling.”
According the report, the F5 Security Operations Center (SOC) for F5® WebSafe™, which tracks and shuts down phishing and fraudulent websites for customers, found that fraud incidents in October, November, and December tend to jump over 50% compared to the annual average.
Indicative of the scale of the problem, 75,6% of all websites taken offline by the F5 SOC between January 2014 and the end of 2017 were related to phishing attacks. This is followed by malicious scripts (11.3%) and URL redirects (5.2%), which are also used in conjunction with phishing operations. Mobile phishing (2%) was also identified as a growing issue.
Tech and finance sectors in the firing line
Although phishing targets vary based on the nature of the scam, a remarkable 71% of attackers’ efforts from 1 September to 31 October 2018 focused on impersonating just ten organisations.
Technology companies were most mimicked (70% of incidents), with 58% of phishers’ time spent posing as big hitters like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, Adobe, Dropbox, and DocuSign during the monitored period.
The finance sector was also under fire. 13 of the top 20 fastest growing targets were financial organisations. Banks accounted for 55% of these, five of which were major European entities.
Notably, some of the most successful malware programs started out as banking malware. For example, Trickbot, Zeus, Dyre, Neverquest, Gozi, GozNym, Dridex, and Gootkit are all banking trojans known to have spread initially through phishing campaigns.
Fighting back
The Phishing and Fraud report stresses that the best first line of defence is a consistent education programme and creating a culture of curiosity. Tests by Webroot show that security awareness training can have a particularly ameliorative effect.
Companies that ran 11 or more training campaigns reduced employee phishing click-through rates to 13%. Six to ten sessions saw a 28% click-through rate, rising to 33% with one to five employee engagements.
In addition to awareness-raising, F5 Labs stresses the importance of organisations implementing access control protections, including multi-factor authentication and credential stuffing controls, to prevent phished credentials becoming a breach. Other report recommendations include the following defensive tactics:
“Phishing is a big problem and we expect attacks to continue because they are so effective, especially during the winter period” added Warburton.
“As organisations get better at web application security, it will be easier for fraudsters to phish people than to find web exploits. Ultimately, there is no one-stop-shop security control for phishing and fraud. A comprehensive control framework that includes people, process, and technology is a critical requirement to reduce the risk of an attack becoming a major incident.”