Fax/Scan Phishing Attacks Jump Nearly 500% as Workers Return to the Office

The bad guys take advantage of any major event as the source of a new phishing campaign. According to new data from Avanan, this latest campaign aligns with heading back to the office.

Remember those copiers and scanners you have in the office? The ones nobody has touched in the last 14 months? Those are the impetus for a new phishing campaign centered around users returning to the office. According to security vendor Avanan, the number of fax/scan-related phishing emails has jumped significantly in May.

According to their data, January through April of this year saw just over 53K phishing emails using a request for the recipient to review a fake fax or scan, complete with a malicious link. This represents around 13K emails using this kind of theming per month that look similar to the one below.

Source: Avanan

But in May alone, that number spiked to 65K – a 500% increase, aligning perfectly with many businesses issuing “return to work” orders to their employees.

As you bring your users back to the office, it may also be time to improve the state of your cybersecurity by enrolling them in continual Security Awareness Training that educates them on these and other themes of phishing attacks, keeping your employees abreast of the latest scams and social engineering tactics to help keep themselves and the organization safe from cyberattack.