Financial Services Industry Experiences a Massive Increase in Brand Abuse



Financial Services Industry Increase Brand AbuseIndustry analysis of the domains used behind phishing and brand impersonation attacks show financial institutions are being leveraged at an alarming rate.

It’s one thing to see your industry at the top of some “state of” cybersecurity report, but it’s entirely different to learn that 68% of all phishing web pages identified in a single quarter are from your industry.

That’s exactly what we find in Akamai’s latest analysis of websites across the Internet.  According to the reported details, domains impersonating businesses in the financial services sector is overwhelmingly the industry of choice at the moment:

  • Of all domains used for phishing, 68% of them were related to financial institutions (with every other industry fitting into the remaining 32%!)
  • Of all domains used specifically for brand impersonation, approximately 28% impersonated financial institutions, which was the top industry in the list

Akamai points the finger at the emergence of phishing-as-a-service platforms and similar toolkits that have lowered the barrier to entry for the everyday cybercriminal.  With pre-built websites made to look like financial institutions around the world, these types of platforms make it easy to target individuals by impersonating their bank, etc.

The only way for potential victims to stay clear of such attacks is to see the socially-engineered emails, texts, and voicemails that launch these attacks for what they are via new-school security awareness training.

KnowBe4 empowers your workforce to make smarter security decisions every day. Over 70,000 organizations worldwide trust the KnowBe4 platform to strengthen their security culture and reduce human risk.


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Now they can launch a "CEO fraud" spear phishing attack on your organization, and that type of attack is very hard to defend against, unless your users are highly ‘security awareness’ trained.

Find out now if your domain can be spoofed. The Domain Spoof Test (DST) is a one-time free service. Run this test so you can address any mail server configuration issues that are found.

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Topics: Phishing



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