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All organizations face the threat of email attacks, but a recent analysis by Barracuda highlights that the impact of these threats varies significantly based on company size.
Lateral phishing, which involves attackers sending malicious emails from a compromised internal account to other mailboxes within the same organization, constitutes approximately 42 percent of targeted email threats for large companies with 2,000 or more employees. In stark contrast, this type of attack accounts for only 2 percent of threats against smaller businesses with fewer than 100 employees.
Conversely, smaller organizations are predominantly targeted by external phishing attacks, which make up 71 percent of the total targeted email threats they face over the past year. This is a significant contrast when compared to larger firms, where external phishing incidents represent 41 percent of their email threats.
When it comes to extortion attacks, smaller companies again face a higher risk. These attacks accounted for seven percent of targeted incidents among the smallest businesses, while only two percent of similar attacks were reported by larger organizations with two thousand or more employees.
The consistency of threats such as business email compromise (BEC) and conversation hijacking remains relatively stable across different company sizes.
“Every organization is at risk from email threats, but they face these risks in distinct ways,” commented Olesia Klevchuk, director of product marketing at Barracuda. She noted that larger organizations with more employees and mailboxes provide attackers with multiple entry points and a wide range of communication channels to propagate malicious content. Moreover, employees may mistakenly trust emails that appear to originate from within their own company, even from unknown senders. On the other hand, smaller firms often lack extensive security measures and might have inadequately configured email filters, largely due to limited resources and expertise.
For further insights, visit the Barracuda blog.
Source
betanews.com