Every business needs to know and understand the large variety of today’s email attacks. Data Exfiltration and URL Phishing are two attacks that can have a costly effect on your business. Providing knowledge to your employees helps them understand how these types of attacks work, and how to prevent them. This knowledge can save your business from costly expenses and wasted downtime.
Data Exfiltration is the unauthorized transfer of data. It’s also called data exportation, data leaks, data leakage, data loss, and data theft.
The unauthorized transfer of data can be conducted manually via physical access to a computer and as an automated process using malicious programming on the internet or a network. These attacks are typically targeted, with the objective of gaining access to a network or machine to locate and copy specific data. In addition to malicious attacks, data is frequently lost accidentally due to human error.
The Impact of data exfiltration according to an annual IBM report is the average total cost of a data breach was $3.92 million in 2019. For some industries, such as healthcare, this number can almost double. Data breaches in the United States were the most expensive, with an average cost of $8.19 million. The average size of a data breach was 25,575 records. Data loss can lead to financial losses and have a long-lasting impact on an organization’s reputation.
URL phishing “spoofed” websites steal your employees’ account password or other confidential information by tricking them into believing they’re on a legitimate website. They could even land on a phishing site by mistyping a URL.
About 32 percent of breaches involve phishing, and many phishing attacks include malicious links to fake websites. The use of URLs in phishing emails is popular and effective because about 4 percent of recipients in any given phishing campaign click on the malicious link and hackers only need one person to let them in.
Given this success rate, it’s not surprising that reported losses in 2019 due to phishing reached almost $58 million. And that’s bad news, considering only 57 percent of organizations have URL protection in place.
We can effectively protect you against these evolving email threats. Email attacks have evolved to bypass traditional defenses and require organizations to set up protection, not only at the gateway but also beyond it. Every business needs to deploy the right combination of technology and people to have effective email protection. Contact us at 502-267-2552 to learn more.
