After a heavy review of emails from the aggregated data of 37 organizations from over 20 industries, it was discovered that from a total of 10,072,682 emails, 203,000 of them contained malicious links–one link for every 50 emails. These numbers come from a test by the Mimecast Email Security Risk Assessment (ESRA), which spaned 1,207 days, and discovered that an 80% rise in impersonation attacks were seen. Along with the previous stats, Mimecast also found 19,086,877 pieces of spam, 13,176 emails containing potentially harmful file types, and 15,656 malware attachments that had been missed by security providers and delivered to unknowing users’ inboxes. In a comment, Matthew Gardiner from Mimecast said “Our latest quarterly analysis saw a continued attacker focus on impersonation attacks quarter-on-quarter. These are difficult attacks to identify without specialized security capabilities, and this testing shows that commonly used systems aren’t doing a good job catching them.” It is hard to believe that even with all the public information showing companies that suffer data breaches and other cyber-attacks, there are still businesses that have not made the effort to enhance their network security parameters.
