Introducing Cloudflare’s 2023 phishing threats report

After shutting down a ‘phishing-as-a-service’ operation that impacted thousands of victims in 43 countries, INTERPOL recently noted, “Cyberattacks such as phishing may be borderless and virtual in nature, but their impact on victims is real and devastating.” Business email compromise (BEC), a type of malware-less attack that tricks recipients into transferring funds — for example — has cost victims worldwide more than $50 billion, according to the FBI.

It is estimated that 90% of successful cyber attacks start with email phishing, which continues to be very lucrative for attackers. There is not much today that can be done to stop phishing attempts. However, to prevent successful attacks, it is important to understand (and proactively address) evolving phishing trends — including the ways attackers cleverly exploit intended victims’ trust in “known” email senders. To that end, this week Cloudflare published its first Phishing Threats Report.

This report explores key phishing trends and related recommendations, based on email security data from May 2022 to May 2023. During that time, Cloudflare processed approximately 13 billion emails, which included blocking approximately 250 million malicious messages from reaching customers’ inboxes. The report is also informed by a Cloudflare-commissioned survey Continue reading