May 23, 2019
Avanan is an enterprise cloud-native security firm that earlier this year raised $25 million in Series B funding from existing investors StageOne Ventures. But, recently the company also released its Global Phish Report.
The report analyzed 55.5 million emails sent to organizations using Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite. The study reveals that 25% of phishing emails bypass Office 365 security, using malicious links and attachments as the main vectors.
Other concerning findings include that 33% of emails containing a link to a site hosted on WordPress and 98% of emails containing a crypto wallet address are phishing attacks. These numbers are likely to increase as hackers design new obfuscation methods that take advantage of zero-day vulnerabilities on platforms such as Office 365 and G Suite.
Over the past decade, phishing attacks have become the most widespread digital threat to organizations around the globe. For most organizations, phishing is the number one email security threat, outranking both malware and ransomware. These attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated and difficult to detect, even with the aid of artificial intelligence to support the effort.
Employees are bombarded with spear phishing, extortion, credential harvesting, and malware attacks. The cloud email platforms by themselves cannot reliably block emails containing malicious language, links, or attachments. Gil Friedrich, CEO at Avanan joins me on my daily tech podcast to talk about everything else the report uncovered.