Abnormal Security has released a report focusing on the email security threat landscape in Europe.
The Email Security Threats in Europe: Alarming Attack Trends report reveals that between April 2023 and April 2024, the volume of phishing attacks targeting organisations in the US and on European enterprises increased by 112.4% and 91.5%, respectively.
The report reveals that Business Email Compromise (BEC) is showing no signs of slowing.
It states: “BEC represents one of the top cybersecurity threats to modern enterprises, with US$2.9 billion lost in 2023 alone. Because these emails are text-based, rely on social engineering rather than exploiting technical vulnerabilities, and rarely contain obvious indicators of compromise (such as malicious links or attachments) they are difficult for legacy security solutions to detect. This leaves employees – notoriously the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain – as the last line of defence.”
The report stated that BEC attacks targeting US enterprises rose by 72.2% year over year.
“While that’s certainly nothing to shake a stick at, organisations in Europe experienced a remarkable 123.8% increase in BEC attacks in April 2024 compared to April 2023. Several factors likely contributed to this spike,” revealed the report.
