• by Ray Schultz , November 1, 2018

Emails impersonating Microsoft or Amazon now constitute two-thirds of advanced deception attacks, according to "Email Fraud & Identity Deception Trends," a study by Agari.

However, the study also found that DMARC adoption by Fortune 500 firms has increased from 33% in 2017 to 51% this year. But only 13% have a quarantine or reject policy.

Microsoft suffered 36% of all brand impersonation attacks, and Amazon comprised 27%. Microsoft’s tally went up when limited to C-level executives and other high-profile targets — to 71%.

Typically, these emails pretend to be service updates, security alerts and password resets. Microsoft’s ubiquity in companies makes the brand particularly vulnerable to impersonation.

Microsoft and Amazon are followed in the top five most victimized brands by Bank of America, Chase and Dropbox. Farther down the list are DocuSign, UPS, Netflix and IRS. 

Dropbox ranks a very distant second in C-level attacks.

Of the frauds examined by Agari, 62% utilize name deception of some sort, with 54% impersonating brands and 8% individuals. At the same time, 3% of deception-based emails are sent from compromised email accounts.

 “The damage from these attacks has ballooned into billions of dollars annually — however, the real cost is the erosion of trust in digital business,” states said Armen Najarian, CMO, Agari.

The report is based on statistics from the Agari Identity Graph, as studied from July through October.