Email fraud is the most common type of illegal activity that is enabled by the Internet. It takes many forms, from simple SPAM to full on phishing fraud. Each day, millions of fraudulent emails are sent every day. And if your company is used as the basis for email fraud, with the fraudster using your brand image, then the negative effects can be significant.
Yet many companies don’t give the risk of email fraud due weight. They lack any pre-defined business processes for managing an occurrence of brand abuse due to email fraud. So, in this blog post, we are going to offer up some very surprising statistics.
66% of senior decision makers do not believe that their company is able to defend themselves against email fraud and cyber attacks – and when it comes to developing new products and services, security is one of the lowest rated design drivers. (Veracode)
For each instance of a stolen piece of data, it costs a company $154 on average (IBM) – multiply this by the number of successful phishing attacks that expose data, and the cost could be high.
In the period from 2014 to 2015, the estimated cost of phishing attacks to companies around the world was $4.5 billion (RSA) – and this cost can only have increased during 2016.
Every person who uses email receives at least 1 phishing email every day (phishing.org) – however, this might be a bit of a false positive, as many of these emails will likely be caught by SPAM filters.
A new phishing attack takes place every minute (RSA) – that’s a new phishing attack, not a new phishing email, a phishing attack will usually send hundreds or thousands of separate emails.
70% of all fraudulent email is sent from a domain name that does not match the company of the branding that has been used within the email – most modern email clients don’t show the full sending address of an email unless the user clicks to expose it.
97% of all people who are sent a phishing email do not realize it is a fraudulent email (Intel) – expert phishing teams can put together extremely convincing emails, carrying full company branding, and legitimately sounding content.
The overall success rate for email fraud is 45% (Google) – the most shocking static of all. Almost half of the people who receive a scam or fraudulent email fall for it.
Email Fraud Can Damage Your Brand
Take a look at those statistics above. There can be no doubt that email fraud is rife. And this is a situation that is not going to change anytime soon. Indeed, it will only get worse.
If your company is unlucky enough to be used as a vehicle for email fraud, it could have a massive negative impact on brand value. Unless you have the in-house resources to continuously monitor for instances of email fraud using your brand, the most cost effective way to tackle this problem is to outsource the responsibility to a third party.