Bad News for Businesses: Malvertising Threats Ramp Up

Malvertising Threats Add Unexpected Risk – Here’s How to Fight Back 

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As the Great Work from Home continues in the wake of COVID-19 and the economy tightens, cybercriminals are ramping up their efforts to score a quick payday. The hunger for COVID-19 information and less stringent cybersecurity for remote workers has opened up new opportunities in the malvertising sector, and bad actors are working overtime to ram up malvertising threats.

Malvertising threats are a flavor of social engineering. Generally, a malvertisment is a hybrid of a phishing attack with a component that either steals information or plants a Trojan. Malvertising can happen through formjacking, email impersonation, malicious redirects, social media fakery, or classic email scams, and it can happen anytime, anywhere. It can also have a wide variety of variations, and that’s been especially problematic as businesses grapple with phishing threats created by COVID-19. 

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Big Increases in Incidence and More Targeted Delivery Means Trouble

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Your business is at risk from malvertising. The sharp increase in people working from home has increased malvertising threats too, and as lockdowns lengthened and became more stringent, malvertising threats grew as well, especially COVID-19 threats, increasing more than 116% in March 2020. Malvertisers were particularly targeting Chrome browsers on Windows 10 systems (27%) and Firefox on Windows 10 (25%). Increases were also noted in malvertising targeting mobile devices as the lockdowns progressed, with 32% pointed at iPhones.  

Cybercriminals didn’t waste any time to take advantage of many workers being separated from their IT departments by deploying scareware (which made up 86% of threats in 2020), and they were quick to capitalize on the hunger for information with impersonation schemes and Google ad redirects. Also, many workers are logging in on poorly secured home WiFi, without the protections that they’d normally have from in-office network security and regular maintenance like patching– creating unbeatable opportunities for bad actors to strike. 

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Fight Back: Boost Your Phishing Defense 

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Malvertising is a form of phishing. Improving your phishing defense and phishing resistance training is key to prevent malvertising from becoming a disaster for your business. Phishing threats are inundating businesses every day, from spear phishing threats to messaging app attacks. Increasing and improving your phishing resistance training is essential, especially for supporting a remote workforce that faces an increased threat atmosphere.

BullPhish ID is perfectly suited for remote training, with easy to manage plug-and-play training campaigns including compelling video in 8 languages. We add 4 new kits every month to the hundreds that are available, and you can easily measure retention with online testing to see who needs more help.

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We Can Help Defend Your Business

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Defending your business from malvertising threats isn’t complicated when you use our digital risk protection platform. With improved phishing resistance training using BullPhish ID, you can reduce your company’s risk of experiencing a damaging cyberattack by 70%. Invest wisely in phishing resistance training now and you can feel confident that your company is ready for phishing-related threats like malvertising – and whatever’s next.

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