Half of all Financial Services Cyber Attacks Start with a Very Costly Phish
New analysis of attacks on the financial sector shows that the combination of phishing emails and compromised credentials is a recurring — and financially impactful — threat.
According to IBM, financial services is the second most expensive sector with an average cost of a data breach at $6.1 million.
And it appears that email-based attacks are a material source of data breaches, ransomware, business email compromise and more for the financial services sector — this, according to Trustwave’s 2024 Risk Radar Report: Financial Services Sector. In this report, we find these interesting details about attacks and their outcomes:
- 49% of attacks originated from phishing
- 37% of phishing emails used HTML attachments
- phishing and stolen credential attacks were the most frequent attack types
- Phishing and business email compromise were tied as the second most expensive initial attack vectors in data breaches, with the average cost at $4.9 million
To counter these attacks, TrustWave recommend the following mitigations:
- Email filtering solutions to block based on content, sender, and reputation
- A layered email security solution to detect anomalous (read: potentially malicious) email
- Security awareness training and phishing testing to keep users vigilant
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.
Free BreachSim Tool
How easy is it for bad actors to penetrate your system and exfiltrate your data? Pinpoint vulnerabilities, take action and build stronger cyber defenses with KnowBe4’s Breach Simulator “BreachSim.” Based on techniques outlined in the MITRE Att&CK framework, BreachSim launches 12+ simulated scenarios to uncover the stark reality of what happens when employees unknowingly fall for an attack.
How BreachSim works:
- 100% harmless simulation of real breach and data exfiltration attacks
- Provides secure .txt, .doc, and .bmp test files for the simulation
- Tests 12+ realistic data exfiltration scenarios following the MITRE Att&CK framework
- Just download the installer, upload the secure test files, and run
Results in a few minutes!
PS: Don’t like to click on redirected buttons? Cut & Paste this link in your browser: https://info.knowbe4.com/breached-password-test-partner?partnerid=001a000001lWEoJAAW