ESET study finds phishing on the rise in North America

Tony Anscombe, global security evangelist at ESET

In terms of means for launching a cyberattack, phishing is hardly new or novel, but it is on the rise in North America according to ESET’s study of attacks in the first half of 2023.

ESET global security evangelist Tony Anscombe joins us on the podcast to break down all the news found in the security giant’s extensive telemetry over the first six months of the year, and he points out that cybercriminals are really getting their campaigns together. So what can the channel community do to ensure their customers are as safe as possible?

We discuss:

the rising tide of phishing scams in the North American market and how it shows cybercriminals are campaigning smarter than ever before;
the role Anscombe sees AI playing in cleaning up and differentiating phishing attempts;
why North America is an attractive market for phishers;
the dominance of BlackBasta on the North American ransomware market and the development of ransomware-as-a-service as an ecosystem;
what the IT channel community should be thinking about in terms of security trends and keeping their customers as safe as possible;
the role of unpatched vulnerabilities in proliferating attacks, and the need for patch management and EDR to combat would-be attackers;
new types of attacks taking advantage of Microsoft’s OneNote application on the heels of fixing Office VBA macro vulnerabilities;
just how flexible cybercriminals are in changing their methods and business models in the face of changing market realities and opportunities;
untrustworthy financial aggregation apps on the mobile front;
why there’s been an uptick in sextortion scams; and
why solution providers need to layer remediation on top of prevention to keep their customers as safe as possible.