To companies in Italy, the phishing costs on average 680 thousand euros a year: emails sent by hacker (and poor training) are a huge damage to the country’s economy. The recent attack Siae ransomware, which apparently originated from a phishing email, once again demonstrates the importance of countering this phenomenon.
The economic damage of phishing in Italy: 680 thousand euros per company
The search for Sophos called ‘Phishing Insights 2021‘underlines an increasing phenomenon around the world. Phishing remains the fastest method for hackers who want to attack a company. Especially now that with smartworking not all endpoints of the corporate network are protected in the same way: just one email attachment downloaded to the laptop you work with from home.
According to Sophos: “In Italy, the average cost incurred by all companies in 2021 to remedy the damage caused by this type of attacks, including downtime, working hours and ransoms paid, is 0.68 million dollars”. And it is not the only data that goes in this direction. The Brand Phishing Report from Check Point Software Technologies not only highlights the problem, but highlights the brands most “copied” by hackers to deceive company employees. 29% of the attacks copied Microsoft, especially for recovering fake accounts or changing passwords. It follows Amazon then DHL, with fake tracking of incoming packages.
The fact that Amazon and DHL are among the most counterfeit brands to deceive us is a concern given the arrival of the shopping period. Under Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we risk becoming even more vulnerable. But on the list of the ten most counterfeit brands we also find Bestbuy (8%), Google (6%), WhatsApp (3%), Netflix (2.6%), LinkedIn (2.5%), Paypal (2.3%), Facebook (2.2%).
Stolen data is often sold to you on the dark web, for personal scams but also for hackers who want to access corporate servers. According to another study by Bitglass, information on the dark web they move eleven times faster than six years ago. Making phishing emails even more dangerous.
Considering that over half a million per year per company is the cost of being “scammed via email”, the price of training your employees no longer seems that high. Paying attention to the attachments you download and the links you click is the first step in stopping this huge problem.