Microsoft Dominates as the Most Impersonated Brand in Phishing Attacks

New data from phishing detection vendor Inky highlights which brands are most often used by cybercriminals in phishing attacks that will give them the edge needed for a successful phish.

If you were to analyze nearly 657 million emails, you’d probably have a good grasp on exactly what the bad guys are doing to phish potential victims. They be able to see the tactics used, the campaign themes in play, and the impersonated brands.

In the case of Inky’s latest report, The Top 25 Most Phished Brands, it’s clear with just under 70% of the impersonation-related phishing emails captured, that Microsoft is the brand most often impersonated by phishing scammers.

With household name brands like Zoom, Amazon, and Chase bank in the running (they were numbers 2 through 4 in the report), it’s amazing to see that they only garnered 9.3%, 6.7%, and 2.4% respectively of the total phishing emails using impersonation.

Microsoft comes out on top of most impersonated.

We’ve covered the use of Microsoft’s Office 365 as both an impersonated brand and the target for collecting compromised credentials many times in this blog. The prevalence of Office 365’s use makes Microsoft a natural target.

Because so many of you are likely using Microsoft’s Office 365, it’s important to keep your users vigilant using Security Awareness Training to educate them on how brand impersonation and social engineering are used to trick them into providing their Office 365 credentials.