Sophos, a global leader in next-generation cybersecurity, has released the results of its global survey report, titled โPhishing Insights 2021โ. In this survey, it emerged that phishing attacks in Nigeria have increased, and the outcome of this survey shows that phishing attacks against businesses, among many other things, increased significantly during the pandemic period, as millions of employees, who couldnโt go to their workplace, but worked from home became prime targets for phishing attacks by cybercriminals.
According to the survey, the majority of Information Technology (IT) teams in Nigeria reported an increase in the number of phishing emails targeted at their staff in 2020.
โPhishing has been around for almost 25 years and remains an efficient cyberattack technique,โ Chester Wisniewski, Principal Research Scientist at Sophos, stated in an analysis of the data. One of the reasons for its success is its capacity to adapt and diversify over time, customizing attacks to current events or worries, such as the epidemic, and preying on human emotions and trust.
Dismiss phishing attacks in Nigeria at your own peril
Businesses may be tempted to dismiss phishing attempts as a small problem, but this underestimates their significance. Phishing is frequently the opening stage of a multi-stage attack. Attackers commonly employ phishing emails to fool users into installing malware or giving credentials that give access to the corporate network, according to the Sophos Rapid Response team.โ
The research also found that there is a lack of consensus on what constitutes phishing. According to the survey, 55% of Nigerian IT teams connect phishing with emails that falsely pretend to be from a genuine company and are frequently accompanied by a threat or a request for information. According to the survey, 45 percent of respondents feel BEC attacks constitute phishing, and 34% say thread jacking is phishing, particularly when attackers inject themselves into a legitimate email conversation as part of an attack. Phishing attacks in Nigeria should be taken seriously.
The good news is that 86 percent of Nigerian firms have instituted cybersecurity awareness initiatives to combat phishing. Computer-based training programs (55 percent), human-led training programs (39 percent), and phishing simulations are all used by respondents (36 percent ). The ideal situation would be for phishing emails to never reach their intended recipient, according to Wisniewski. Effective email security solutions can help, but they should be accompanied by attentive and primed staff who can recognize and report questionable messages before they spread further, according to Wisniewski.
Sophos polled 5,400 IT decision-makers in 30 countries throughout Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa for its Phishing Insights study.
Sophos offers a comprehensive set of sophisticated solutions and services to protect users, malware, networks, malware, and endpoints against ransomware, exploits, phishing, and other attacks, utilizing threat intelligence, artificial intelligence, and machine learning from SophosLabs and SophosAI.
Sophos Central is a consolidated data lake and a broad collection of open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for usage by customers, partners, developers, and other cybersecurity suppliers.
Takeaways
We now realise that with phishing attacks in Nigeria, the majority of Information Technology (IT) teams in Nigeria reported an increase in the number of phishing emails targeted at their staff in 2020. Phishing has been around for almost 25 years and remains an efficient cyberattack technique.
According to the survey, the majority of IT teams in Nigeria reported an increase in the number of phishing emails targeted at their staff in 2020, and 55% of Nigerian IT teams connect phishing with emails that falsely pretend to be from a genuine company. Also, 45 percent of respondents feel BEC attacks constitute phishing, and 34% say thread jacking is phishing. The ideal situation would be for phishing emails to never reach their intended recipient. Letโs take care