Microsoft: phishing up, ransomware down in 2018

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Microsoft published the company's Security Intelligence Report for the year 2018 recently; the security data analysis provides an insight into major threat types in 2018.

In short: ransomware is on a decline, phishing is on the rise, crypto-mining is prevalent, software supply chains are a risk, and overall malware decreased in 2018.

Phishing

Phishing remains one of the top attack vectors used to deliver malicious zero-day payloads to users, and Microsoft has continued to harden against these attacks with additional anti-phishing protection, detection, investigation, and response capabilities to help secure users

Phishing messages increased by 250% between January and December 2018 according to Microsoft. The company scanned more than 470 billion email messages for malware and phishing monthly in 2018.

Phishing methods evolved further in 2018. Microsoft notes that attackers use more sophisticated methods to make attacks more powerful. The times of using single URL, domain, or IP addresses to send emails are long gone as attackers moved to "a varied infrastructure with multiple points of attack".

The nature of phishing campaigns changed as well. Attackers use different delivery spans and schedules, and rely more on using hosted infrastructure and cloud services in their attacks to make detection difficult.

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