Security News > 2020 > April > New year, old threats: Malware peddlers went into overdrive in Q1, says Trend Micro
Business email compromise attempts were globally up by a quarter in the first two months of this year alone, according to research from threat intel firm Trend Micro.
"IT security teams around the world may be under significant pressure today, as the corporate attack surface expands thanks to mass home working demands in the face of the COVID-19 epidemic. But now, more than ever, they must be on high alert as opportunistic cyber-attackers look to strike," said a solemn Ian Heritage, cloud security architect at Trend Micro.
Those BEC attacks included CEO fraud, where the cybercrim pretends to be the boss sending an email to an employee instructing them to send money to a particular bank account; bogus invoices; and plain old compromise of staff email accounts, letting scammers pose as real employees to seed malware within a target organisation.
Strangely enough, the number of malware-laden attachments on emails detected by Trend Micro shrank by 74 per cent over the same time period.
Emotet banking trojan detections shrank by more than half, down from 13,418 to 6,615 instances seen by Trend over the first eight weeks of the year.