Email attacks on the rise, research claims

The number of emails sporting potentially dangerous attachments has risen sharply, and your security platform may not be doing enough to stop it, new research has claimed.

The latest figures from Mimecast uncovered a 25 per cent rise in possibly malicious emails during the last three months compared to the previous year, due partly to shortcomings in many leading detection services.

The company’s latest quarterly Email Security Risk Assessment (ESRA) examined more than 180 million emails over the period, finding that 16,581 of these contained a dangerous file type.

Read also: Scientists turn wasp venom into potentially ground-breaking antibiotic

Overall, the report claims that 21,183,014 spam emails, 17,403 malware attachments, 42,350 impersonation attacks and 205,363 malicious URLS were all missed and delivered to users’ inboxes.

This means that around 12 percent of all secured and filtered email were unwanted emails and thus were false negatives.

Mimecast highlighted a number of attack trends rising in the last quarter, including key executives being targeted with cloud storage services exploits, impersonation attacks targeting legal, finance and administrative assistance, and social engineering attacks against the C-suite.

Join the conversation

Opinions

Support Ripples Nigeria, hold up solutions journalism

Balanced, fearless journalism driven by data comes at huge financial costs.

As a media platform, we hold leadership accountable and will not trade the right to press freedom and free speech for a piece of cake.

If you like what we do, and are ready to uphold solutions journalism, kindly donate to the Ripples Nigeria cause.

Your support would help to ensure that citizens and institutions continue to have free access to credible and reliable information for societal development.

Donate Now