Phishing attacks can end up being a real nuisance because of the fact that it can make people feel unsafe on the internet due to the reason that their credentials and data might just end up getting stolen, and recent research has indicated that big name companies are being used millions of times a year for such phishing attacks. The biggest culprit for this sort of thing is Facebook with over 4.5 million phishing attacks being conducted using Facebook’s name in just a five month period this year.
WhatsApp is another target for such things, with cybercriminals using the messaging platform’s name attempting 3.7 million attacks in the same 5 month period. This makes the total attacks conducted using Facebook and its subsidiaries names to give themselves a bit of legitimacy totaling well over 8 million in just 5 months, something that should make the social media giant quite wary of how its name is being used and taking a few steps to ensure that such incidences are reduced in their frequency so that people can end up feeling a little safer when checking their email.
With all of that having been said and out of the way, it is important to note that Facebook is not the only company that is targeted in these kinds of attacks. Amazon and Apple are used in such attacks as well, with each of these companies being used well over 3 million times between April and September. Netflix is also commonly used, coming in at about 2.7 million attempts, but this number is surprisingly low when you consider how frequently Netflix ends up sending you email correspondence that you might want to actually interact with whereas correspondence from Facebook and WhatsApp usually ends up being ignored so there is clearly something wrong with how Facebook is doing things.
Google does surprisingly well here too, with all of its offerings from YouTube to Google Drive as well as the search engine itself being used in about 1.5 million attacks which is pretty great when you take into account the fact that there are so many services that are being included in this number. Facebook is not doing enough to protect users from phishing attacks and the tech giant definitely needs to step its game up so that eventually phishing attacks would end up become exceedingly difficult for people to do.
WhatsApp is another target for such things, with cybercriminals using the messaging platform’s name attempting 3.7 million attacks in the same 5 month period. This makes the total attacks conducted using Facebook and its subsidiaries names to give themselves a bit of legitimacy totaling well over 8 million in just 5 months, something that should make the social media giant quite wary of how its name is being used and taking a few steps to ensure that such incidences are reduced in their frequency so that people can end up feeling a little safer when checking their email.
With all of that having been said and out of the way, it is important to note that Facebook is not the only company that is targeted in these kinds of attacks. Amazon and Apple are used in such attacks as well, with each of these companies being used well over 3 million times between April and September. Netflix is also commonly used, coming in at about 2.7 million attempts, but this number is surprisingly low when you consider how frequently Netflix ends up sending you email correspondence that you might want to actually interact with whereas correspondence from Facebook and WhatsApp usually ends up being ignored so there is clearly something wrong with how Facebook is doing things.
Google does surprisingly well here too, with all of its offerings from YouTube to Google Drive as well as the search engine itself being used in about 1.5 million attacks which is pretty great when you take into account the fact that there are so many services that are being included in this number. Facebook is not doing enough to protect users from phishing attacks and the tech giant definitely needs to step its game up so that eventually phishing attacks would end up become exceedingly difficult for people to do.
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