Email has always been a popular tool for business communications. Unfortunately, it is also one of the weakest links in an organization’s security strategy. 94 percent of all cybersecurity incidents originate from emails.
As organizations all over the world have adopted remote work at an unprecedented rate, the dependence on email has also simultaneously increased. This has made email a lucrative attack vector among cybercriminals.
According to a UN official, there has been a 600 percent increase in malicious emails amid the COVID-19 crisis. Various scam campaigns involving spear phishing, impersonation attacks, and account takeovers to steal money, intellectual property, or other forms of sensitive data belonging to an organization have been growing rampant.
This is mainly because email-borne cyberattacks are relatively unsophisticated and therefore easy to carry out when compared to other types of cyberattacks. This, coupled with the capability of reaching thousands of people at once, makes it highly challenging for IT teams to protect their employees from inadvertently divulging sensitive organizational data to attackers.
Understanding the anatomy of such scams and how attackers manage to successfully deceive employees helps a lot in spotting them as quickly as possible rather than enabling or engaging with them accidentally.
In this e-book, we’ve discussed the most common types of emails that are likely to be used for scamming employees, and what you can do to avoid becoming a victim.
