Artificial intelligence tools significantly contributed to the 50 percent rise in global phishing attacks in 2022, according to an annual study released by Zscaler.
The 2023 ThreatLabz Phishing Report, which was published on Tuesday, named the United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Canada and Russia as the countries most targeted by the evolving cyberthreat.
Compared to global phishing data in 2021, attacks against the education sector surged 576 percent last year, Zscaler found. The retail and wholesale market, which was the most targeted industry in 2022, showed a 67 percent decline in phishing incidents.
The cloud security firm attributed the overall increase to the growing popularity of the interplanetary file system protocol for data sharing and storage. Hackers are also using ChatGPT and other technologies from the black market to launch more sophisticated attacks, such as the Adversary-in-the-Middle technique for forging or stealing credentials.
Adobe, Binance, Facebook, Microsoft and Netflix were identified as the top brand targets, while education, finance and government were the most vulnerable sectors, Zscaler noted.
The company urged organizations to install cloud-native and proxy-based zero trust architecture to shield themselves from phishing attacks.
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