Email Impersonation Attacks Dramatically Spike in 2017

Mimecast’s Email Security Risk Assessment (ESRA), which measures the effectiveness of existing email security systems in regular use by tens of thousands of organizations globally, found there to be the continued challenge of securing organizations from malicious attachments and spam—but most alarming was the rising impersonation success rate. Mimecast reported that impersonation attacks (aka whaling or business email compromise), which rely on duping recipients into wiring the attacker money or highly monetizable data, rose almost 50% quarter over quarter. Emails with malware attachments or dangerous files types, combined, only increased about 15%.