05 December 2023

Hornetsecurity’s Cyber Security Report 2024 highlights the growing threat of cybercriminals using harmful web links in emails.

An analysis of 45 billion emails found a 144% increase in this type of attack compared to last year, rising from 12.5% of all threats in 2022 to 30.5% this year. It is phishing, however, that remains the most common email attack technique. Its use increased by nearly 4 percentage points this year, rising from 39.6% to 43.3% of all email attacks.

Of the 45 billion emails analysed, 36.4% were categorised as unwanted. Within this category, just over 3.6% - or more than 585 million - were identified as malicious. This represents the widespread nature of the risk, with a vast number of emails posing potential threats.

Threat actors are savvy and adaptable. In the last year, following Microsoft disabling macros by default in Office, there was a significant decline in the use of DOCX files (by 9.5 percentage points) and XLSX files (by 6.7 percentage points). Instead, cyber-criminals opted for HTML files (37.1% of files analysed), PDFs (23.3%) and Archive files (20.8%). HTML file usage is a particularly notable trend: usage rose by 76.6% over the last year.

Brand impersonation continues to target victims, soliciting sensitive information via phishing. Shipping and e-commerce emails are to be regarded with particular caution: DHL accounts for 26.1% of all impersonations, Amazon 7.7% and Fedex 2.3%. All three were in the top 10 most spoofed. Other popular brands, including LinkedIn, Microsoft (both 2.4%), and Netflix (2.2%), also featured in the top 10.