Manufacturing and healthcare among top targets for phishing attacks

A new report from cloud email and collaboration specialist Avanan shows healthcare and manufacturing as two of the top industries being targeted by hackers in the first half of the year.

The most attacked industries are IT, healthcare, and manufacturing. IT saw over 9,000 phishing emails in a one month span, out of an average of 376,914 total emails. Healthcare saw over 6,000 phishing emails out of an average of 451,792 total emails and manufacturing saw just under 6,000 phishing emails out of an average of 331,184 total emails.

"With hospitals around the world being hit with ransomware attacks and manufacturers experiencing supply chain disruption due to cyber attacks, the Avanan research shows that hackers are using one of the most basic tactics to get in -- phishing attacks," says Gil Friedrich, CEO and co-founder of Avanan.

Impersonation and credential harvesting attacks remain the top motives for phishing. Credential harvesting, 54 percent of all phishing attacks, has risen by nearly 15 percent when compared to 2019. 20.7 percent of all phishing attacks are Business Email Compromise (BEC) and only 2.2 percent of phishing attacks are extortion.

There also seems to have been a move away from targeting senior executives. Now, 51.9 percent of all impersonation emails attempt to impersonate a non-executive in the organization. In fact, non-executives are targeted 77 percent more often.

Misconfiguration is playing a rising role in phishing too. More than eight percent of phishing emails have ended up in the user's inbox simply because of an allow or block list misconfiguration, a five percent increase from last year, and 15.4 percent of email attacks are on an Allow list.

The most commonly used tactic is using non-standard characters and limited sender reputation. Non-standard characters are used in 50.6 percent of phishing links and 84.3 percent of phishing emails do not have a significant historical reputation with the victim.

You can get the full report from the Avanan site.

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