Half of all Financial Services Cyber Attacks Start with a Very Costly Phish

New analysis of attacks on the financial sector shows that the combination of phishing emails and compromised credentials is a recurring — and financially impactful — threat.

According to IBM, financial services is the second most expensive sector with an average cost of a data breach at $6.1 million.

And it appears that email-based attacks are a material source of data breaches, ransomware, business email compromise and more for the financial services sector — this, according to Trustwave’s 2024 Risk Radar Report: Financial Services Sector.  In this report, we find these interesting details about attacks and their outcomes:

• 49% of attacks originated from phishing
• 37% of phishing emails used HTML attachments
• phishing and stolen credential attacks were the most frequent attack types
• Phishing and business email compromise were tied as the second most expensive initial attack vectors in data breaches, with the average cost at $4.9 million

To counter these attacks, TrustWave recommend the following mitigations:

• Email filtering solutions to block based on content, sender, and reputation
• A layered email security solution to detect anomalous (read: potentially malicious) email
• Security awareness training and phishing testing to keep users vigilant

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