A large percentage of your business Email messages It may not be useful in any way, a new report that examines billions of messages has claimed.
Research from HornetsSecurity analyzing 25 billion Business emails It found nearly half (40.5%) to be “junk”, and could pose a serious threat to businesses.
The report also revealed how email remains a common vector of threat, with the most common type of malicious message. Phishing attacks – emails pretending to be from well-known companies, Sometimes quite convincingly – which accounted for 39.6% of all threats.
False sense of security
When it comes to malicious email attachments, archive files like Zip make up the largest percentage (28% of messages), followed by web (HTML) files at 21%. Text files were also commonly used, with contaminated Microsoft Word documents accounting for 12.7%, PDF 12.4% and Excel 10.4%.
The report also found that cybercriminals are developing new methods in response to the changing digital landscape. For example, attacks that exploit the capabilities of macros in Microsoft 365 are no longer viable since then Microsoft disabled the feature last yearspecifically to enhance its security.
As a result, new tactics were adopted. HTML smuggling rose, where hidden LNK or ZIP files are contained within web links for spreading malware.
Daniel Hoffman, CEO of Hornetsecurity, warned that due to the spread of Cloud-based systemsLike Microsoft 365, its use should deserve the same level of caution. The Hornetsecurity report found that a quarter of respondents did not know that 365 could be a potential gateway for ransomware — some even assumed it was invulnerable to such threats.
Hoffman advised: “Ongoing training must be in place to prevent fraudsters from tampering with people’s trust in Microsoft and other office systems.” He also referred specifically to Microsoft Teamsadding that “it is also important to ensure that all data shared via this platform is backed up.”
Other reports have found a similar – or even higher – percentage of spam emails in people’s accounts. Recent results from Kaspersky, for example, put the number between 45-85%.
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