Google Security Report brands phishing as biggest Cyber Threat!

866

Google in association with the University of California conducted a recent study in which it discovered how user accounts are being hijacked in practical. Thus, in this process, the web search giant came to a conclusion that many users were following a procedure of using a single login to access different web services. And this was giving way to phishing scams having the potential to do more damage than simplifying the life of web users.

The study which took place from March 2016 to March 2017 focused mainly on large black market tactics like 3rd party password breaches and 25K black-hat tools being utilized for phishing and keylogging. The research further identified that 788,000 credentials were stolen using keyloggers, 12 million credentials were stolen by cyber crooks through phishing and 3.3 billion credentials leaked to hackers through third party breaches.

From past couple of years, web service giants such as Google are asking for more details other than username and password to access an account from a new device. Hence, security tactics such as these are making cyber criminals show a lot of interest in finding more sensitive data on users to help them bypass verification processes.

Google Security Report which also focused on issues such as black market response on obtaining and selling user credentials concluded that cyber crooks were making merry by selling such data on the dark web. The report says that data such as the one specified above is fetching hackers anything between $1200 to $7000 for the details of every 1,000 accounts.

Though, Google is trying its best to protect its users from all kinds of cyber threats. It also wants its users to learn and start the implementation of new security tools such as its recently announced Advanced Protection Program and its 2-step verification program called Google Prompt. Also by doing so, users using web services can also keep their accounts safe from social engineering cyber attacks employed by some state-funded actors.

Ad
Naveen Goud is a writer at Cybersecurity Insiders covering topics such as Mergers & Acquisitions, Startups, Cyber Attacks, Cloud Security and Mobile Security

No posts to display