Common Phishing Lines, Stats, and Quiz You Shouldn’t Miss – 2020

Most probably you are aware of the phishing scams and the abundance of such tactics. But, most of us could not distinguish a legitimate email and a phishing scam and that’s why we fall victim to an attack.

You will be surprised to know the phishing lines or messages that were most clicked in 2018. In fact, it is possible that you have also experienced such messages and you haven’t recognized the phishing attempt behind it.

The KnowBe4 Company released a list of top-clicked phishing emails which they unveil every quarter. KnowBe4 2018 has broken down the data into three categories which are the email subjects related to social media, general emails and “in the wild” attacks.

The popular categories of phishing scams were, passwords, company policies, deliveries, vacations, and IT department. However, some top keywords include terms such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Wells Fargo which could excite a person at first sight.

Same kind of statement is given by Perry Carpenter, the Chief evangelist and strategy officer at KnowBe4. He said, “Clicking an email is as much about human psychology as it is about accomplishing a task.”

Here is an infographic view of the report released by KnowBe4.

Google Released Quiz – Can You Spot Phishing Email?

If you are worried about falling victim to phishing scams then you can test your efficiency to detect the phishing emails via the recently released Google Phishing quiz.

Jigsaw, a subsidiary of Alphabet (Google parent company) has released a quiz which enables an individual to test that whether he/she is capable of spotting a phishing email or not. Also, this quiz result lets you to highlight how to identify the possible scams.

While talking about the quiz, Jigsaw said, “We created this quiz based on the security trainings we’ve held with nearly 10,000 journalists, activists, and political leaders around the world from Ukraine to Syria to Ecuador.” They said that they monitored the latest techniques used by attackers.

The invention lets you learn the identification of email addresses and URLs to spot scams.

Phishing Risk to Industries (Statistics)

KnowBe4 also researched about the industries which are at most risk of phishing. The monitored firms include small to large scale industries. The research statistics show that the small scale insurance companies are at highest percentage of Phish-prone employees in the category of small to mid-size industry category. However, among the large organizations, the non-profit organizations were at the top.

This study involves data from six million plus users across almost 11,000 industries, benchmark the real-world phishing attacks. The data highlights the decrease to 13% in careless clicking from 27% after just 90 days of initial training and stimulated phishing. However, the level goes to just 2% after 12 months of combined phishing and computer based training (CBT).