It’s no surprise that threat actors regularly utilize phishing—sending emails pretending to be from reputable companies to entice individuals to reveal personal information—as a primary source of fuel for fraud, especially account takeovers. A recent report from cybersecurity firm Bolster found that the growth in phishing attacks brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic has continued its trajectory. In their 2022 Phishing and Fraud Report, the report’s writers found a 153 percent increase in phishing during 2021, bringing the number of detected scam pages to 10.7 million.
The report’s writers noted that July, November and December all broke the one million mark for number of phishing/counterfeit pages detected with the overall average number of detected pages jumping to over 29,000 per day in 2021. In addition, attacks more than doubled for retail and social networking, more than tripled for e-commerce and more than quadrupled for SaaS, communications, gaming and streaming industries.
Industry heavyweights Amazon and Netflix were mentioned in the report as some of the top brands phished in 2021. As more and more of us are doing more digitally, threat actors are taking advantage of every opportunity to socially engineer users every day.
You can download the full report here.
