Business-Targeted Email Fraud Sees Huge Increase

Business-Targeted Email Fraud Sees Huge Increase

Email fraud has seen a 476 percent increase between Q4 2018 and Q4 2017, according to the Proofpoint Q4 2018 Threat Report.

  • By Jessica Davis
  • Feb 12, 2019

Email fraud has seen a 476 percent increase between Q4 2018 and Q4 2017, according to the Proofpoint Q4 2018 Threat Report. The report highlights trends and threats across the cybersecurity company’s customer base as well as the larger online landscape.

Email fraud attacks, also known as business email compromise, has seen a rapid increase lately. Proofpoint researchers found that the number of email fraud attacks against targeted companies increased 226 percent between Q3 and Q4 of 2018, and 476 percent between Q4 2017 and Q4 2018.

“Email fraud has seen explosive growth and it’s clear that today’s cybercriminals are relentlessly targeting people, rather than infrastructure,” said Tim Bentley, Proofpoint’s Vice President of Asia-Pacific and Japan.

Proofpoint analyzes more than five billion emails, hundreds of millions of social media posts and more than 250 million malware samples every day in order to protect organizations from advanced online cyber-attacks.

According to the Q4 2018 Threat Report, banking Trojans were the top-email borne threat during the quarter, totaling 56 percent of all malicious emails. Remote access Trojans made up 8.4 percent of all malicious payloads in Q4 and 5.2 percent for the year, an increase from previous years, when they were rarely used.

Social media fraud remains a challenge for consumers and brands despite platforms working to develop protections. Fraudulent social media support phishing, also known as “angler phishing,” increased by 442 percent year-on-year.

Proofpoint’s Q4 2018 Threat Report can be read in its entirety here.

About the Author

Jessica Davis is the Associate Content Editor for 1105 Media.

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