Security News > 2024 > February > Clean links and sophisticated scams mark new era in email attacks
Analysis of 7 billion emails shows clean links are duping users, malicious EML attachments increased 10-fold in Q4, and social engineering attacks are at all-time highs, according to VIPRE Security.
Often protected by nothing more than human nature and an antivirus, cybercriminals continue to use email to launch their most basic and persistent attacks.
While EML attachments were a present threat throughout 2023, they increased tenfold in Q4. The benefit of sending malicious payloads via EML file is that they can get easily overlooked by many basic email security solutions when attached to the actual phishing email.
The real weak link remains humans, as the prevalence of social engineering attacks will attest; of all spam emails, 35% were scams, and 22% were phishing attempts.
Information technology experienced a 59% increase in attacks between Q1 and Q4, whilst attacks on government inboxes went up by a staggering 16,000%.
Email attack methods are diversifying, and current email security solutions continue to fall further behind.