As the healthcare industry closes the books on 2018, it is still reeling from more than 327 major data breaches that exposed personal health information (PHI) on at least 9.8 million US citizens this past year.
A breach itself is bad enough, but the time it takes an organization to discover and contain that breach is where the majority of costs are incurred.
You’ve seen headlines like "Facebook and Google were Scammed Out of $100 Million" and "Equifax's Massive Data Breach Has Cost the Company $4 Billion So Far."
Ask any security professional what the number one pain point is within their organization, and chances are they’ll say ‘user behavior’…with ‘malware’ coming in as a very close second. And while these issues are very different on the surface, they do have one thing in common: both are often the cause of high-profile data breaches, largely in part to the increased use of spear phishing email exploits by cybercriminals.
At Agari, we are vocal about the steps organizations can take to protect their brands and customers from the impact of phishing attacks. But what exactly are the hard numbers behind our mission?
Let’s look at some phishing statistics showing a clear need for change when it comes to mitigating the phishing problem.
A rising threat
I first heard about the Ashley Madison breach on July 15, 2015 in a post by Brian Krebs. I immediately wondered what the fallout of such a breach would be. Would Ashley Madison's new tagline be "1 million divorces and counting!" Would the perpetrators try to profit from the stolen data, perhaps through blackmail?
JPMorgan Chase said last week that cybercriminals had compromised its systems and obtained customer names, phone numbers and email addresses for 76 million households, and as a result people will be concerned about how their data is being used following the breach. But one recent article suggested that phishing scams are a possible outcome, and in the case of JPMorgan Chase, we can confirm that there is no need for concern.