A 1,760% year-on-year increase in social engineering-based Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks over the course of 2023 has been identified by Perception Point, a provider of advanced email and workspace security solutions. The report titled, ‘2024 Annual Report: Cybersecurity Trends & Insights’ highlights the increasing trend of attackers leveraging GenAI tools.
The ease of accessibility to these tools has led to attackers being able to scale and craft highly sophisticated and novel social engineering attacks. It has also put organisations of all kinds and sizes at a considerable risk of BEC attacks. Along with BEC, quishing (QR code phishing) and two-step phishing, bypass traditional security systems.
The hallmark of a BEC attack is impersonation. Attackers pretend to be trusted identities through spoofed email addresses or compromised accounts making them harder to detect. The targets are hence tricked into divulging sensitive information or making unauthorised financial transactions. BEC attacks accounted for only 1% of all cyberattacks in 2022 and 18.6% in 2023.
Phishing contributes to 70% of all cyber-attacks with minor change from the previous year. A new threat that emerged was quishing. It contributed to 2.7% of all phishing attempts. Two-step phishing attacks increased by 175%. Threat actors attempting two-step phishing exploit legitimate services and hosting sites making them even harder to detect.
A staggering 350% rise was reported in account takeover (ATO) based threats where a legitimate account outside the organisation is compromised (Vendor Email Compromise) and used in highly targeted attacks. Email attacks continued to be the top attack vector, with 1 in 5 emails categorised as malicious or spam. Malware distribution accounted for 65% of attacks in M365 Apps including OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams.
The advent of AI is proving especially beneficial to threat actors as it helps them create trustworthy identities that replicate the original organisations. With company data easily available and access to GenAI, attackers can now tailor emails to the targeted organisation, making them seem more convincing.
Combating the threat
Security platforms can use AI-native detection engines to ingest, analyse, and spot behavioural signals to identify anomalies in email patterns that indicate a potential attack, and then prevent end-user engagement. Maintaining top-notch cyber security without external expertise and guidance is almost impossible in the current situation.
At Logix, we offer Check Point Harmony, a premier AI-enabled email security solution that can detect and prevent modern age attacks like QR Code Phishing and AI-generated phishing email content. Prevent sophisticated attacks with AI powered prevention across emails & collaboration applications, with our FREE 11 Days POC of Check Point Harmony.