Phishing clicks nearly tripled in 2024 as criminals aim for smarter attacks
Phishing awareness forced threat actors to get creative – and it’s paying off.
The number of people clicking on links in phishing attacks increased three times in a year
Netskope’s new report argues this is because threat actors have evolved their tactics
Cloud apps remain the number one target
The number of workers clicking on phishing links saw a major increase in 2024, putting businesses of all sizes at risk of compromise, new research has claimed.
A report from Netskope based on anonymized usage data collected by its Netskope One platform, found during the year, for every 1,000 workers, there were 8.4 who clicked on a link in a phishing email.
This represents a threefold increase from the year before, when just 2.9 people did the same.
Microsoft a popular target
Netskope says the significant increase in successful phishing attempts was particularly down to two things: people suffering from cognitive fatigue (there are simply too many phishing attacks and people eventually drop their guard), and threat actors being super creative and adaptable, thus creating harder-to-detect campaigns.
This being said, threat actors were most interested in access to cloud apps. These took up more than a quarter of all the clicks, with Microsoft’s Live and 365 credentials being of particular interest.
Pages targeting Yahoo and AOL were also quite widespread, while those for Adobe and DocuSign were used as stepping stones towards other credentials.
“Microsoft’s popularity as a phishing target is unsurprising because Microsoft 365 is the most popular productivity suite by a large margin,” the report stated.
Phishing awareness training will also need to be revamped this year, Netskope suggested, since it was too focused on email, and not enough on other channels.
Email was not the number one attack vector distributing these phishing links. Netskope thinks this is mostly because people have learned to pay attention to incoming emails, forcing threat actors to get creative. “They know their victims may be wary of inbound emails (where they are repeatedly taught not to click on links) but will much more freely click on links in search engine results,” the report says.
So, instead of through emails, users were tricked on search engines (through SEO poisoning), as well as shopping, technology, and entertainment sites running referrals in comments, malicious ads, and infected sites.
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