IT, health care and manufacturing top phishing attack targets

ZDNet reports that IT, health care and manufacturing organizations received the highest number of phishing emails in a one-month period. Avanan's 1H 2021 Global Phish Cyber Attack Report found that attackers have been launching numerous attacks against the said industries due to their use of outdated technology and their abundance of collected data, according to researchers. The report also showed that phishing accounted for nearly 5% of all emails, most of which involved credential harvesting or impersonation. Meanwhile, phishing attacks targeted non-executive accounts 77% more, compared with other accounts, while about 52% of impersonation emails claimed to be from an enterprise non-executive account. "There are a few reasons behind this. One, security admins might be spending a lot of time providing extra attention to the C-Suite and hackers have adjusted. Two, non-executives still hold sensitive information and have access to financial data. There is no need to go all the way up the food chain," said Avanan researchers.