Phishing attempts grew by 640% last year

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Notable Findings:

• Phishing URLs encountered grew by 640 percent in 2019.
  • 1 in 4 malicious URLs is hosted on an otherwise non-malicious domain.
  • 8.9 million URLs were found hosting a cryptojacking script.
  • The top sites impersonated by phishing sites or cybercriminals are Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Google, PayPal and DropBox.
  • The top five kinds of websites impersonated by phishing sites are crypto exchanges (55%), gaming (50%), web email (40%), financial institutions (40%) and payment services (32%).

• Malware targeting Windows 7® increased by 125 percent.
  • 93.6 percent of malware seen was unique to a single PC – the highest rate ever observed.
  • 85 percent of threats hide in one of four locations: %temp%, %appdata%, %cache%, and %windir%, with more than half of threats (54.4%) on business PCs hiding in %temp% folders. This risk can be easily mitigated by setting a Windows policy to disallow programs from running from the temp directory.
  • IP addresses associated with Windows exploits grew by 360 percent, with the majority of exploits targeting out-of-date operating systems.

• Consumer PCs remain nearly twice as likely to get infected as business PCs.  
  • The data reveals that regions most likely to be infected also have the highest rates of using older operating systems.
  • Of the infected consumer devices, more than 35 percent were infected more than three times, and nearly 10 percent encountered six or more infections.
  • The continued insecurity of consumer PCs underscore the risk companies face in allowing employees to connect to business networks from their personal devices.

• Trojans and malware accounted for 91.8 percent of Android™ threats.

Explore all the findings here.

The 2020 Webroot Threat Report presents analysis, findings and insights from the Webroot Threat Research team on the state of cyber threats. The report analyzed samples from more than 37 billion URLs, 842 million domains, 4 billion IP addresses, 31 million active mobile apps, and 36 billion file behavior records. The statistics presented in this annual threat report are derived from metrics automatically captured and analyzed by the Webroot® Platform, our advanced, cloud-based machine learning architecture. This system provides proactive protection for users and networks against both known and zero-day, never-before-seen and advanced persistent threats. Threat intelligence produced by the platform is used by Webroot® endpoint security products and by technology partners through Webroot BrightCloud® Threat Intelligence Services.