Report: Best practices to defend against evolving spear-phishing attacks

As their speedy exploitation of fears around the COVID-19 pandemic show, cybercriminals adapt quickly to current events and new tactics.

Barracuda researchers recently spent several months analyzing spear-phishing attacks looking for new patterns and tactics. They share their findings in the new report Spear Phishing: Top Threats and Trends Vol. 5 - Best Practices to Defend Against Evolving Attacks. This in-depth report takes a look at the evolving trends in spear phishing and the new ways attackers are tricking their victims.

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Fresh insights on email attack trends

Barracuda’s research reveals key takeaways about how these targeted attacks are evolving and the approaches cybercriminals are using to maximize their impact.

• Business email compromise (BEC) makes up 12% of the spear-phishing attacks analyzed, an increase from just 7% in 2019.


• 72% of COVID-19-related attacks are scamming. In comparison, 36% of overall attacks are scamming. Attackers prefer to use COVID-19 in their less targeted scamming attacks that focus on fake cures and donations.


• 13% of all spear-phishing attacks come from internally compromised accounts, so organizations need to invest in protecting their internal email traffic as much as they do in protecting from external senders.


• 71% of spear-phishing attacks include malicious URLs, but only 30% of BEC attacks included a link. Hackers using BEC want to establish trust with their victim and expect a reply to their email, and the lack of a URL makes it harder to detect the attack.

Get your free copy of Spear Phishing: Top Threats and Trends Vol. 5 - Best Practices to Defend Against Evolving Attacks now to see all the revealing details, the latest tactics used by scammers and the best practices to defend against spear-phishing attacks. Get new analysis and insight to help protect your business from these targeted, sophisticated, evolving threats.

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