The 24th volume of Microsoft’s Security Intelligence Report shows that phishing surged in 2018. The detected 250% increase in phishing attacks last year confirms similar findings of other recent studies.
The research also confirmed that threat actors are moving away from ransomware and malicious software (malware) in general, as malware detections decreased by 34% in 2018. In the beginning of last year, many attackers made the switch from ransomware to cryptojacking attacks, in which threat actors hijack the processing resources of targeted systems to mine cryptocurrency. However, Microsoft found that the popularity of cryptomining was short-lived, since this type of attack decreased by 36% over the course of 2018.
Read more: Microsoft Sees 250% Phishing Increase, Malware Decline by 34%
