South African companies saw an increase in phishing attacks containing malicious links or attachments in the past year. This is according to Mimecast’s 2019 State of E-mail Security Report, which notes that e-mail attacks are cheap, easy, low risk and high reward for cyber criminals.
The report states that in 2018, 53% of South African companies were impacted by e-mail attacks, while 63% reported increases in impersonation fraud.
“Not only is the volume of attacks increasing, they are becoming more sophisticated and the pace at which criminals are innovating is cause for immense concern,” comments Brian Pinnock, cyber security expert at Mimecast.
“A single e-mail breach can hit your revenue and reputation hard. Protecting against this is not easy. The sheer amount of e-mails that pass through an organisation each day complicates the process of securing yourself from e-mail-borne threats.”
Pinnock adds that Mimecast’s latest E-mail Security Risk Assessment, an aggregated report of tests that measure the efficacy of widely used e-mail security systems, found that many e-mail attacks ranging from opportunistic spam to highly targeted impersonation attacks are getting through incumbent e-mail security systems.
Commenting on the attacks on financial institutions, Manny Corregedor, chief operations officer at information security company Telspace Systems, says the financial sector is highly targeted, especially by organised crime.
“It is where the money is. Therefore, organised crime will spend resources, money because the return on investment on their side is worth it. They will find a way to compromise an organisation if the reward is worth it; as such, it wouldn’t be fair to say that data breaches are as a result of companies not having adequate cyber security controls. However, context is important and each breach needs to be looked at on a case per case basis.” ITweb.co.za has the story:
https://www.itweb.co.za/content/RgeVDMPozbN7KJN3/pXnWJadMba7bjO1e
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