Yahoo Impersonated in 20% of Phishing Attacks

Phishing attacks have been a thorn in the side of the average internet user for quite a long time. In spite of the fact that this is the case, they continue to rise unabated, and the malicious actors behind these attacks seem to come up with new and better ways implementing them on a regular basis.

Check Point Software Technologies just published a new report that highlighted trends in phishing attacks for the fourth quarter of 2022. One of the things that this report revealed was which brands end up getting impersonated the most often in phishing attacks, and it turns out that Yahoo is a prime candidate for malicious actors who want to make their phishing attacks more successful than might have been the case otherwise.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that Yahoo was impersonated in around 20% of the phishing attacks that were noted in the Q4 2022. Most of the phishing emails that are impersonating Yahoo appear to claim that the recipient of the email has won some kind of prize, even though no such program is being offered by Yahoo as of right now.

Yahoo is not the only major corporation that sees itself getting impersonated time and time again in phishing emails. DHL has also been a popular choice, with 16% of Q4 2022 phishing attacks impersonating the freight and delivery service.

Following that we had Microsoft which has impersonated in 11% of such attacks, and these three companies collectively account for just under half of all phishing attacks. By comparison, Google is only impersonated in about 5.8% of phishing attacks, at least as far as Q4 2022 is concerned.

Users should receive some kind of training or education that might enable them to better recognize phishing or other forms of malicious emails and avoid interacting with them entirely. If an email is offering something that seems too good to be true, it’s fairly likely that you are about to get phished and it would be better to delete the email and ideally report it for spam.


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