84% of Organizations Experienced Phishing & Ransomware Type Threats in the Past 12 Months

“Phishing and ransomware were already critical enterprise
security risks even before the pandemic hit and, as this report shows, the
advent of mass remote working has increased the pressure of these threats,”
said Tony Lee, head of consulting at Trend Micro Hong Kong and Macau.
“Organizations need multi-layered defenses in place to mitigate these risks.
These range from phishing simulations to advanced threat detection and response
platforms like Trend Micro Vision One, which alert security teams before attackers
can make an impact.”

The study asked respondents to rate their effectiveness
in 17 key best practice areas related to ransomware and phishing, ranging from
protecting endpoints from malware infection to ensuring prompt patching of all
systems.

Key takeaways from the report include:

• 50% rated themselves ineffective overall at
  tackling phishing and ransomware.
• 72% consider themselves ineffective at
  preventing home infrastructure from being a conduit for attacks on corporate
  networks.
• Only
  37% believed they were highly effective at following 11 or more of the
  highlighted best practices.

The report
further split the threat landscape into 17 types of security incident and found
84% of respondents had experienced at least one of these—highlighting the prevalence
of phishing and ransomware. Most common were successful:

• Business
  email compromise (BEC) attack – 53%
• Phishing
  messages resulting in malware infection – 49%
• Account
  compromise – 47%

Phishing
remains among the top vectors for threat actors. Although it can be the first
stage in a ransomware attack, it’s also used in BEC raids, or to infect victims
with malware including info-stealers, banking trojans, spyware, crypto-miners,
and more.

Ransomware
has become a modern epidemic, hitting government, hospitals, schools and
private enterprises and any other targets deemed vulnerable to extortion and
capable of paying. It results most often in both data loss and potential
serious IT service outages.

The security
issues flagged by respondents as most concerning were:

• 65%
  phishing attempts landing in user inboxes
• 65%
  users clicking on phishing links or opening attachments
• 61%
  data theft via ransomware actors

The report also contains a trove of useful information
for organizations including typical attack TTPs, effective mitigations and
capabilities to look out for in commercial cybersecurity solutions.

High success rates for both phishing and ransomware
campaigns mean both are likely to intensify over the coming years. The report
recommends that organizations embrace the following best practices to mitigate
cyber-risk:

• Focus on root causes of compromise
  using a risk-based approach to address the most damaging threats
• Improve authentication via
  use of password managers, tweaking policies, monitoring for credential breaches
  and even using passwordless authentication
• Take a people, process and technology
  approach including user training, incident response processes and
  technology like Vision One to detect and respond to threats early on
• Don’t wait for a breach
  before developing an incident response plan. Reach out to law enforcement,
  managed services providers, your security vendors, and other key stakeholders
  now