What Brands Are Most Frequently Impersonated?

Well known brands such as Microsoft and Netflix are among the most impersonated in phishing attacks.

Brands enable attacks

Attacks based around phishing come in all forms from websites to compromised emails. Brands are often what enables these forms of attacks to be successful. Most people inherently trust a Microsoft branded email or link.

Microsoft and Facebook

Microsoft and Facebook were the most impersonated brands in phishing attacks in the first half of 2022 this is according to security and threat detection firm Vade. They found over 11k unique urls for Microsoft based phishing and 10k for Facebook based.

Microsoft has got the number one position according to researchers. An increase of 266% in the first half of URLs was experienced by the tech giant.

Microsoft and Facebook were followed by French banking group Crédit Agricole (8.2k), WhatsApp (8.1k), and Orange (7.8 k).

Financial services brands

Eight of the top 25 brands were found to be in the financial services which include Credit Agricole, MTB, and PayPal used for phishing most often. This shows that finance is the most impersonated industry.

The cloud industry has been claimed by Vade researchers to be the second most impersonated, with six brands in the top 25. Among those are Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Sharefile, and Docusign.

What enables these attacks?

Vade’s report has also made the statment that most phishing attacks occur on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The way scammers choose specific days for attacks is no coincidence.

Between two and 6 in the middle of the day according to Vade is the most effective time to phish. This is due to those days employees being more stressed and tired leading to more mistakes.

Last weeks article is available here.