62 percent of phishing emails pass DMARC checks

Phishing remains a significant threat to organizations. A new report from Darktrace shows 17.8 million phishing emails detected across its customer fleet between December 21, 2023, and July 5, 2024. Alarmingly, 62 percent of these emails successfully bypassed DMARC checks.

Cybercriminals are embracing more sophisticated tactics, techniques and procedures designed to evade traditional security parameters.

Darktrace has observed an increase in attackers making use of popular, legitimate third-party services and sites, such as Dropbox and Slack, in their operations to blend in with normal network traffic. Additionally, there's been a spike in the use of covert command and control mechanisms, including remote monitoring and management tools, tunneling, and proxy services.

The report also shows that cybercrime-as-a-service continues to dominate the threat landscape, with malware-as-a-service (MaaS) and ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) tools making up a significant portion of malicious tools in use by attackers.

"The threat landscape continues to evolve, but new threats often build upon old foundations rather than replacing them. While we have observed the emergence of new malware families, many attacks are carried out by the usual suspects that we have seen over the last few years, still utilizing familiar techniques and malware variants," says Nathaniel Jones, director of strategic threat and engagement at Darktrace. "The persistence of MaaS/RaaS service models alongside the emergence of newer threats like Qilin ransomware underscores the continued need for adaptive, machine learning powered, security measures that can keep pace with a rapidly evolving threat landscape."

The most common threats seen over the report period are: information-stealing malware (29 percent of early triaged investigations), Trojans (15 percent of investigated threats), Remote Access Trojans (RATs) (12 percent), botnets (six percent) and loaders (also six percent).

The full report is available from, the Darktrace site.

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