Sharp increase in phishing as cybercriminals leverage SEO to lure victims - SecurityBrief Asia

Cybercriminals are growing in sophistication, leveraging various social engineering techniques and Trojan families to target victims more effectively, according to a new report.

Netskope has published new research that found that phishing downloads saw a sharp increase of 450% over the past 12 months, fuelled by attackers using search engine optimisation techniques to improve the ranking of malicious PDF files on popular search engines, including Google and Bing.

The findings are part of the latest edition of the Netskope Cloud and Threat Report: Global Cloud and Malware Trends, which examines the past 12 months of malware downloads from the cloud and web around the globe.

The top web referrer categories contained some categories traditionally associated with malware, particularly shareware/freeware, but were dominated by more unconventional categories. The acceleration in the use of search engines to deliver malware over the past 12 months provides insight into how adept some attackers have become at SEO. Malware downloads referred by search engines were predominantly malicious PDF files, including many malicious fake CAPTCHAs that redirected users to phishing, spam, scam, and malware websites.

The report also found that most malware over the past 12 months was downloaded from within the same region as its victim, a growing trend that points to the increasing sophistication of cybercriminals, which more frequently stage malware to avoid geofencing filters and other...



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