Spear-phishing insights
Spear phishing is low-volume but high impact.
In an analysis of 50 billion emails across 3.5 million mailboxes, Barracuda researchers uncovered nearly 30,000,000 spear-phishing emails. While these emails make up less than 0.1% of all emails sent, but they are responsible for 66% of all breaches.
Organizations are feeling the effects.
Nearly every victim of spear-phishing in the last 12 months saw impacts on their organization, including malware infections, stolen data, account takeover, monetary loss, and reputational damage.
Threat detection and response remains a challenge.
On average, organizations take nearly 100 hours to identify, respond to, and remediate a post-deliver email threat — 43 hours to detect the attack and 56 hours to respond and remediate after the attack is detected.
Having more remote workers slows detection and response.
Companies with more than a 50% remote workforce also reported that it takes longer to both detect and response to email security incidents — 55 hours to detect and 63 hours to response and mitigate, compared to an average of 36 hours and 51 hours respectively for organizations with fewer remote workers.
