What are the targets for phishing messages?
Phishing is where scammers send messages by email, text or phone pretending to be from someone you are likely to trust e.g. your bank, British Gas, Microsoft, your Internet provider, local government HMRC etc.
Basically, they do this in order to get information from you – personal information that can be sold to scammers, spammers and identity thieves. That includes email addresses, phone number, payment card details, bank account details, date of birth etc.,
Proofpoint’s 2017 Human Factor Report, shows that a quarter of all phishing scams target Apple IDs (i.e. login and password)
| TARGET | Percentage of Phishing Messages |
| Apple | 25% |
| Microsoft | 17% |
| Google Drive | 12.9% |
| USAA | 12.4% |
| Paypal | 10.6% |
| Adobe | 5.8% |
| Dropbox | 4.8% |
| Blackboard | 4.7% |
| 4.5% | |
| CapitalOne | 2.2% |
According to the survey, Scammers seem to have the most success when phishing with Dropbox as that gets far more clicks (13%) than say phishing for Apple (1%)
The fact that fake invoices are used in 26% of phishing scams is not surprising as it is the most popular phishing technique aimed at businesses.
The next most common approaches are:- malware infected file attachments, mail delivery failure messages, fake orders and fake payments.
If you have any experiences with scammers, spammers or time-waster do let me know, by email.
