Advanced Phishing Attacks Tripled In 2022

Hackers are now using  in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning tools to simplify and automate the process of generating attacks. At the same time, according to research, the adoption of cloud collaboration apps and services has greatly expanded the threat landscape, with a 161% surge in attacks targeting these channels.

Perception Point's 2023 Annual Report: Cybersecurity Trends & Insights' analyses the most prevalent cyber attack trends amidst today's complex threat landscape, identifying an overall increase of 87% in the total number of attacks over the course of last year.

Perception Point is a Prevention-as-a-Service company deivering next-generation detection and response to all attacks across email, cloud collaboration channels and web browsers. According to their report, attackers are  developing sophisticated techniques to breach organisations, resulting in a significant increase in advanced phishing attacks, with a 356% rise in such attacks attempted by threat actors in 2022.

Overall in 2022, the total number of attacks increased by 87%, demonstrating the escalating threat that cyber attacks pose to organisations. 

Phishing attacks accounted for 67.4% of all attacks in 2022, while Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks grew by 83%. This is when cyber criminals impersonate legitimate businesses and leverage social engineering techniques as well as thread hijacking to obtain large sums of money or confidential data, are often difficult for traditional email security solutions to detect.

These types of attacks, which are text-based, target individual employees, who are the weakest link in an organisation's security chain, even when they are highly trained.

Throughout 2022, Perception Point’s team analysed several concerning trends. Firstly, malicious actors continue to gain widespread access to new tools and advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) which simplify and automate the process of generating attacks.

Attackers are increasingly able to effortlessly launch sophisticated attacks, many of which are characterised by social engineering as well as evasion techniques, such as URL redirection, which make it difficult for the victim to identify them as malicious.

The research also identifies how the threat landscape is changing due to the rapid adoption of new cloud collaboration apps, cloud storage, and services for productivity and external collaboration. “As the global threat landscape continues to evolve, we are sharing vital data that portrays the meteoric rise in the number of attacks, combined with increasingly sophisticated attack techniques that are designed to breach and damage organisations,” said Yoram Salinger Perception Point's CEO.

Perception Point:   PR Newswire:     Dark Reading:     Infosecurity Magazine:     HelpNetSecurity:  

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