According to Mimecast’s latest risk assessment report, close to 11,653 emails containing malware were missed by enterprise-level protection systems. This is due to a sharp increase in the amount of impersonation attacks, which use social engineering to trick users such as finance managers, executive assistants, and HR representatives into making wire transfers or providing information which can be monetized by cybercriminals.
Lookalike domains are also increasingly becoming a problem, with attackers are now using non-western character sets to display letters that look identical to the normal ones , such as the Cyrillic “а” in comparison to the Western “a”.
Regionally, Mimecast says that the UAE and KSA is easily in the top 20 list of countries that are targets for email attacks, but this has declined in the last five years or so as companies have started paying attention and implementing proper security.
As part of the assessment, Mimecast inspected more than 95 million emails, all of which had passed through organizations’ existing email security vendors. The report found more than 14,277,163 pieces of spam, 9,992 emails containing dangerous file types, and 849 unknown emails with malware attachments -- all missed by the security providers and delivered to users’ inboxes.
