Must-Know 2024 Phishing Stats for MSPs

Businesses have struggled to defend against the numerous phishing campaigns targeting their data over the last few years. Phishing is incredibly useful for cybercriminals. They spend minimal effort and money upfront to send several emails across numerous domains and hope at least one results in a successful data breach. A single data breach can bank millions for attackers, and phishing continues to bypass expensive cybersecurity defenses.

The first quarter of 2024 shows that phishing continues to threaten organizations. Phishing is one of the most difficult to stop, whether meant to steal credentials, install malware on the network, or steal data. Phishing plays on human emotions, and even the best security infrastructure can’t predict human emotions. Security infrastructure can mitigate damage, but activity from phishing messages happens from legitimate users.

Important Phishing Statistics for Businesses in 2024

Phishing isn’t a new attack strategy. Phishing has long been a favorite tool for cyber-criminals. For years, phishing and email have been the primary attack strategies to bypass cybersecurity infrastructure and use human emotion as an effective vulnerability. Cybersecurity researchers track common threats every year, and phishing is still their primary concern.

Here are a few phishing statistics for 2024 polled from 500 cybersecurity professionals:

• 94% of organizations suffered from at least one phishing attack.
• After an employee caused a data breach by falling victim to phishing, 74% of employees were disciplined, left the organization, or were forcefully terminated.
• 58% of the successful phishing attacks resulted in account takeover of business credentials.
• 79% of the phishing attacks started with an email addressed to high-privileged accounts, and 83% of these phishing messages required an additional step of bypassing multi-factor authentication (MFA).
• Most cybersecurity professionals interviewed said that chatbots in phishing attacks are their primary concern.
• Cybersecurity professionals say that their SEG (Secure Email Gateway) and static DLP (Data Loss Prevention) policies are two infrastructure components that concern them the most.

After an employee caused a data breach by falling victim to phishing, 74% of employees were disciplined, left the organization, or were forcefully terminated.

New Threats in Cybersecurity and Phishing

The cybersecurity landscape continually evolves, but artificial intelligence (AI) has had the biggest impact on all technology spaces. AI has been a component of cybersecurity for years, but OpenAI and the introduction of ChatGPT boosted AI’s popularity. Large language models (LLMs) made headlines for their ability to create human-like text.

Artificial intelligence used for text is still in its infancy, but it’s been a valuable tool for phishing authors. Previously, poor spelling and grammar would be a red flag for users to identify malicious email messages. With artificial intelligence, phishing authors can create text that sounds realistic with no grammar or spelling errors. Poor writing isn’t the only red flag in phishing, but it is common and easily identified by the reader. Now, users do not have the initial red flag to identify phishing messages before the threat strategy goes any further.

Better phishing text has led to more effective threat strategies. Credential theft is more common, and the credentials are often used to steal email accounts. The stolen business email accounts can be used in additional phishing attacks and to exfiltrate data. Business email compromise (BEC) is another growing concern for organizations and their staff responsible for protecting critical data.

What Can Businesses Do to Stop Phishing Attacks?

Even though phishing threat authors are much better at tricking victims than they were years ago, businesses still have ways to identify and stop them. Cybersecurity infrastructure and employee training are imperative for data protection and helping employees identify and prevent threats. The most significant component in protecting your environment is email security.

Email security is the most critical component in protecting your employees and data from phishing. Email filters block messages from malicious domains and IP addresses. Other factors go into filtering email messages, including content analyzed using artificial intelligence and blocking based on text, embedded links, or attachments. AI-based email filters scan content and use heuristic data to determine if a message should pass to the recipient’s inbox.

If email security determines that the message should be contained, the system passes the message to a quarantine storage location. A quarantine section stores potential phishing messages, and administrators can view messages to determine if they are false positives. Users don’t have access to the quarantine section, but administrators can review and delete messages from the environment or pass false positives to the recipient’s inbox. Public email services put these messages into a spam box or drop (delete) them without warning. A quarantine section avoids deleting false positives but protects users from having access to possible phishing messages.

Another strategy to stop phishing is to offer employees security training to help them identify attacks. Security awareness training should be used as a failsafe in case of a false negative, but it should not be your primary cybersecurity defense from phishing. Users can identify phishing from their security awareness training if their email filters fail. Security awareness training complements your email filtering solution strategy.

Email filtering should be your first defense. You can run the software on-premises or in the cloud. Administrators leave any updates and security patches to the vendor if the software runs in the cloud. A cloud-based solution makes configuring and running email security much easier for administrators. Administrators don’t have the overhead and maintenance requirements when the email security vendor manages the filtering solution.

AI-based filtering solutions use heuristic data from threat intelligence and continually apply it to models that protect businesses from phishing and other threats. Machine learning uses heuristic data from threat intelligence to identify zero-day threats. Zero-day threats are unseen by researchers or other security experts and can often bypass traditional security defenses.

What Can PhishTitan Do for MSPs?

PhishTitans’ multiple layers of analysis and detection methods offer unbeatable anti-phishing accuracy for zero-day attacks, with minimal false positive results. The PhishTitan MSP management portal provides a multi-tenant view that gives you everything you need to manage your clients effectively without having to drill down to the individual customer level. You can create your customer, connect their M365 account, and start the mail flow through PhishTitan in less than 10 minutes.