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“It is great news that businesses are reporting more of the malicious URLs and phishing emails that they are targeted by – and this is testament to increasing levels of awareness and education around cybersecurity threats.

It’s clear that the number of scams has risen dramatically since the pandemic, with cybercriminals and fraudsters often using the latest news agenda and topics of concern to lure innocent people into clicking on links and giving up details or spending large amounts of money from their accounts. For example, our Advanced Email Threat Protection AETP quarantined nearly 7.3 billion emails that were classified as bulk spam, scams, and non-targeted phishing threats in 2022 — a 12.5% increase over 2021.

We’re seeing more scams using keywords based on emotive keywords such as the cost-of-living crisis than ever before – and these are often effective as they are top-of-mind for the targets. The NCSC is doing great work in helping to raise awareness of these scams, but businesses can also support by ensuring employees undertake thorough security awareness training programmes. These are now advanced enough to inform and educate employees on the latest threats in real-time, including information security, social engineering, malware, and industry-specific compliance topics – as well as how to report suspicious emails and URLs. Businesses can also use attack simulations to automatically send users for re-education should any training issues be identified.”