Tech Companies Become Most Newly Impersonated Companies for Phishing in 2016

Technology company accounts were newly impersonated more often than financial institutions in 2016 at a ratio of 1:6, according to data collected by Webroot. The company found that the top impersonated companies for phishing in 2016 were Google (22%), Yahoo (18%), and Apple (14%).

Why were they used and why do technology experts believe it’s going to be a continuing trend?  Some say because it’s easier to hack those accounts. People tend to use passwords over and over, making the cybercriminals’ jobs a bit easier. Get one from a successful phishing attempt using one of these tech companies and trying it on another site, results in success quite often.

However, it could also be because the reward is greater. The information contained in these accounts may hold more value on the Dark Web, therefore the effort to get into these accounts becomes well worth it for an enterprising thief.

Other data collected by Webroot finds that malware, particularly ransomware is also on its way up. As has been the trend, it’s becoming more sophisticated all the time. In 2016, 94% of the malware and potentially unwanted programs (PUP) samples that the company analyzed used unique signatures. That means that the signature-based detection methods just don’t work so well anymore, because they are always changing for each piece of ransomware.

Locky, one of the most discussed and dangerous bits of ransomware and those like it will continue to proliferate in 2017. Locky debuted in early 2016 and caused more than 400,000 infections. The FBI estimated that cybercriminals made excess of $1 billion using this ransomware and in 2017 companies that are likely to pay up are in the crosshairs. These are organizations like healthcare companies, schools, and small businesses.

Finally, let’s talk mobile malware. Trojans made up 60% of the malicious mobile apps in 2016, per Webroot. That was stable from the previous year. Although, Android, likely due to its increasing popularity and the “open” architecture, was targeted five times more often than other operating systems.

Because of the increasing use of mobile devices to do all types of tasks, including online banking, malicious apps are gaining steam. Webroot found that 50% of the new or updated mobile apps were considered suspicious at best and often malicious. In 2015, 2 million mobile apps were malicious.  In 2016, that increased to a whopping 10 million.

Phishing tends to be the way a lot of malware makes its way onto devices. Webroot’s data showed that the longest lifecycle for a phishing site was less than two days. The shortest: 15 minutes. Most of them, 84%, were active for less than 24 hours. At these rates, it will be harder and harder for the cybercriminals to be caught.