Phishing and social engineering attacks are the biggest cyber risks faced by organizations. Not only are attacks on the rise, they are becoming more sophisticated. The increase in attacks and cost of mitigating cyber incidents is having a major negative impact on businesses.
Organizations can tackle the problem of phishing and social engineering by implementing technologies that preventing phishing emails from reaching end users’ inboxes and ensuring employees know how to identify threats and response when a malicious email arrives in their inbox.
One of the most effective ways of blocking these phishing and social engineering attacks is implementing an advanced spam filtering solution. SpamTitan blocks more than 99.9% of email spam and uses two antivirus engines to identify and block emails with malicious attachments.
Many organizations provide security training to their employees and teach them to be more security aware, although a new report from the Business Continuity Institute calls for businesses to do more in this regard. In order to tackle phishing and improve resilience to attacks BCI says user education needs to improve.
A one-off training program as part of an employee’s induction is no longer sufficient. Training should be an ongoing process with regular refresher training sessions provided throughout the year. Phishing simulation exercises are also highly beneficial for reinforcing training and gauging how effective training has been.
However, the study suggests only 52% of companies conduct awareness-raising seminars and just 55% conduct regular exercises on likely cybersecurity scenarios. Only 46% run desktop exercises such as attack simulations.
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The BCI study confirmed just how often phishing and social engineering attacks result in cyber incidents. The report shows that 57% of cyber incidents involve phishing or social engineering emails. Malware is responsible for 41% of cyber disruptions, with spear phishing emails accounting for 30% of attacks. Ransomware has grown into a major issue in recent months and is behind 19% of cyber disruptions.
The survey was conducted on 734 individuals from 69 countries. Two thirds of respondents had experienced a cybersecurity incident in the past 12 months with 15% saying they had experienced 10 or more disruptions in the past year. 5% said they experienced between 11 and 20 incidents in the past 12 months, a further 5% experienced between 21 and 50 incidents and 5% said they experienced 51 or more incidents. Responding to these incidents takes up valuable time. 67% of attacks take more than an hour to resolve with 16% taking more than four hours.
These incidents are costing businesses dearly. 33% of organizations said the cost of those attacks exceeded €50,000, while 13% of respondents said they had spent over €250,000 remediating attacks. It should be noted that 40% of respondents that took part in the survey were from SMEs with an annual turnover of less than €1 million.
Cybercriminals are only likely to increase their efforts and conduct more phishing and social engineering attacks. It is therefore essential for businesses to have a high commitment to cyber resilience and to do more to improve cybersecurity defenses. The survey suggests only 60% of senior management are committed to improving their defenses, so there is still plenty of room for improvement.