Even though the concept of spam is about 40 years old and phishing campaigns have been around for over 30 years, email-based attacks remain a massive problem for corporations and individual users alike, a new Cisco report shows.
One of the reasons that email attacks are still so common and potent, is the fact that employees have to keep track of every email they receive and to decide for themselves whether or not a certain message should be opened and if they ought to click on links or download attachments. This opens the door to sophisticated campaigns relying on social engineering to deceive recipients. According to Cisco’s Ben Munroe, this is exactly what we’re seeing, and the fact that these kinds of attacks often work, is not necessarily the fault of gullible users. “It isn’t fair to always say users are not sophisticated,” Munroe believes. Instead, more attention should be paid to the fact that “attackers are extremely sophisticated.”
Read more: The Minefield of Corporate Email
