PayPal tops the list of most phished brands
Predictive email defense company Vade Secure has released a new report ranking the top 25 brands most impersonated in phishing attacks.
The report covering the final quarter of 2019 shows PayPal is the top brand impersonated by cybercriminals for the second quarter in a row, with Facebook taking the number two spot and Microsoft coming in third.
The results are based on analysis of the number of unique phishing URLs detected by Vade Secure and made publicly available on www.IsItPhishing.AI.
While PayPal phishing was down 31 percent compared to Q3, the volume was up 23 percent year on year. With a daily average of 124 unique URLs, PayPal phishing is a threat targeting both consumers and SMB employees.
Microsoft remains the primary corporate target in Q4. With 200 million active business users and counting, Office 365 continues to be the primary driver for Microsoft phishing. Cybercriminals seek Office 365 credentials in order to access sensitive corporate information and use compromised accounts to launch targeted spear phishing attacks on other employees or partners.
For the second quarter running financial services companies account for the most brands and most URLs in the Phishers' Favorites report. A difference in Q4, however, is that Vade saw a shift towards phishing customers of smaller banks. One reason for this could be that while large banks have invested in building out security operations centers, incident response and takedown procedures to limit phishing campaigns impersonating their brand, smaller banks may not have the same level of controls in place.
"When it comes to phishing in particular and cyberattacks in general, change is the only constant," says Adrien Gendre, chief solution architect at Vade Secure. "Threats are evolving rapidly and they are becoming more and more credible to end users. This underscores the need for a comprehensive approach to email security combining threat detection, post-delivery remediation and on-the-fly user training as the last line of defense."
You can read more about the findings on the Vade Secure blog and there's an infographic list of the top 25 brands below.
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