Among all the identified healthcare breaches, the phishing attack is one of the major threats to the privacy of PHI. A few weeks ago, different healthcare companies announced email accounts with the PHI of 1000s of patients has been stolen by different people. On the basis of which, the healthcare employees are answering the phishing emails.
The reports highlighted the increase in Phishing attacks with Malicious URLs
This week a new report has been released and this report shows that there is a major increase in the malicious emails in past few months. A Quarterly threat article from Proofpoint highlighted that the increased level of malicious emails has been found in 3rd quarter of 2017.
As compared to the volume of email records in 2nd quarter, the volume of emails has been increased to 85%. Malware has also been transferred with the help of attachments and other related codes. In quarter 3, the virus is attacking with the help of malicious URLs. By clicking on the URLs, the user is automatically directed to the websites where the malware is downloaded to the device or the login information is collected.
According to Proofpoint analysis there was an increase of 600 percent in phishing attacks with the help of malicious URLs in 3rd quarter. When we compared this rating to 2016, there is a total increase of 2,200%.
Locky is here for revenge
Another analysis of Proofpoint shows that 100s of millions of posts from web 2.0 and billions of emails contained 150+ million malware daily. This report showed the combined results of quarterly analysis. Among all the email attacks, about 64 percent were containing ransomware. In the initial time of the year, the biggest attack in malwares was the Cerber ransomware that was found and controlled by Locky in 3rd quarter. 86% of the ransomware payloads and 55% of malicious payloads was accounted by Locky ransomware. There was also an increased in other types of ransomware like Gobelmposter and Philadelphia.
The second most attack in emails was banking Trojans that contained 24% of all the malicious content. From the downloaders, 5% are information stealers while 6% are malicious emails. The social media virus attack is also increasing with the name of “angler attacks”. It is spreading via Twitter. Twitter is having a check for all those customers who are facing difficulty with the software. Normally a user receives the tweet from fake account with the malicious link.
Proofpoint also identifies an increase of 12% in the email malware attacks in 3rd quarter in 2016. Although, the number of doubtful domains have been decreased to 1 from 20. It is recommended to all the companies to install a valuable and strong spam filtering software for malicious email blocking, or use different solutions to block suspicious URLs or use email authentications, or take some steps to prevent the brands on web 2.0.