Vade has released its annual Phishers' Favorites Year-in-Review report, which analyzed 274,636 phishing pages linked from unique phishing emails between January 1, 2022, and December 31, 2022.
The report found that Facebook remained the top impersonated brand, while Google made a surprising appearance at #3 after a 1,560% increase in unique phishing pages. Microsoft finished in the second position for the second consecutive year, accounting for 9% of all phishing pages. Financial services was the most impersonated industry, representing 34% of all phishing pages, with PayPal, MTB, Crédit Agricole, and La Banaque Postale leading the industry. The cloud sector was the second most impersonated industry, with Microsoft and Google dominating, accounting for more phishing pages than all other cloud brands combined.
The report revealed that productivity suites, such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, have become attractive targets for phishers, creating more opportunities to exploit users before and after an initial compromise.
Phishing volumes increased significantly across industries, rising 48% year-over-year, with internet/telco experiencing the largest increase, followed by cloud, ecommerce/logistics, financial services, and government. The report also identified several notable phishing trends, such as phishers opting for more targeted attacks, exploiting current events, and abusing legitimate services to bypass detection and scale phishing attacks.
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