Given how widespread phishing attacks are, you might think that not only are there a lot of phishing attacks, but that each one lasts a long time. While it’s true that there are a lot of phishing attacks, most phishing attacks do their damage in a really short time.
Research conducted by USENIX recently examined 4.8 million victims who visited phishing pages in a one-year period. And what was the average time of an attack measured by the researchers? “[F]rom the time they first come online, to email distribution, to visitor traffic, to ecosystem detection, and finally to account compromise, we find the average campaign from start to the last victim takes just 21 hours.” Twenty-one hours! It’s over in less than a day.
What did the research discover about the number of victims? “At least 7.42% of visitors supply their credentials and ultimately experience a compromise and subsequent fraudulent transaction. Furthermore, a small collection of highly successful campaigns is responsible for 89.13% of victims.” The bottom line is phishing attacks are fast and effective. And that’s why they keep happening.
One surprising finding from the research, as pointed out in Digital Information World, is “the criminals usually transact after 5.19 days of the victim’s visit to the phishing site.” So, even though you may lose your credentials in less than a day, it can take a week for the criminals to do anything with them. Of course, this is an average. It may indicate that the criminals start harvesting the credentials right away but it takes ten days to act on all of them resulting in an average of about five days. Either way, your best bet is to not get phished in the first place. But, how do you avoid it? With email security software from Phish Protection.
Phish Protection is cloud-based email security with real-time link scanning protection. Being cloud-based is important in protecting users from phishing attacks. We know from research that no matter how well-trained people are, a small percentage will always fall victim to a convincing phishing email. So, what’s the only way to make sure this small percentage is protected? Keep phishing emails out of inboxes altogether. And that’s what cloud-based email security from Phish Protection does.
By rerouting emails to Phish Protection first, the software can scan the emails before they reach the inbox. And since Phish Protection quarantines ALL suspicious emails, they never reach the inbox which means nobody will ever get phished by them.
Phishing attacks are fast, but Phish Protection is faster. Try it free for 60 days. There is no hardware to buy, no software to buy and no maintenance, ever. It sets up in 10 minutes and costs just pennies per user per month. Don’t be one of the 7.42%.