Online Fraud is off the Charts – See For Yourself
You’ve heard us say it before, and we’ll say it again, online fraud represents a tremendous threat to businesses and brands of all sizes. The scale of the problem is mind-boggling, and with so many different digital channels to contend with from websites to social media platforms to marketplaces and more, modern threat actors have the upper hand. In fact, we’ve been measuring the scale of the problem for the past few years.
You’ll recall in our 2019 State of Phishing and Online Fraud Report our systems detected over 4.2 million phishing and scam pages. In 2020, that number jumped to over 6.9 million pages, with nearly 30,000 new phishing and scam pages detected globally on a daily basis. (Read full report here). And this past year, 2021, the rate of phishing and online fraud across the Internet skyrocketed even higher. Stay tuned for our 2022 report to learn more.
Introducing the Bolster Global Fraud Index – Quantifying the Risk
At Bolster we love our data. We find our global data sets extremely useful to measure changes to the overall Internet threat landscape. And to measure relative change over time, we’ve created our Bolster Global Fraud Index. You’ll notice the index is part of a new page we launched on our bolster.ai website designed to share a plethora of phishing and scam data with the security community.
With the Global Fraud Index, we’ve taken our monthly measurements of phishing and scam data and indexed it to January 2020 to generate a 24-month trend line. In this manner, we’re able to measure relative changes to global risk month over month. And by indexing the data to January 2020 specifically (value = 1000), before the world went sideways (and remote), we’re able to observe the effects both COVID-19 and the resultant digital transformation efforts have had on fueling the upward trend line of online fraud.
In January 2022, the Global Fraud Index notches in at 4,579, up 28 points from the previous month and up more than 4.5x compared with January 2020 levels.
Figure 1. Bolster Global Fraud Index (Jan 2020 value = 1000)
Daily Phishing & Scam Threat Data Also Available
In addition to the Global Fraud Index, the new dashboard page also includes daily phishing and scam threat data. Here we provide a view into our system’s previous day findings. To start, you’ll see a daily phishing and scam total for the day. We’ve then sliced the threat data a few different ways to view by:
- Phishing & scam type
- Hosting provider
- Top-level domain
- Geo-location
Figure 2. Daily phishing and scam threat data available on the Global Fraud Index page
Get to Know Our Data & Your Risk
We encourage you to take a few minutes to visit the new page and acquaint yourself with the data. The page is updated daily to reflect previous day threat data so there’s always a reason to return to see how things are changing. Additionally, at the end of each month, we update the Global Fraud Index based on previous month findings.
As we all know, in cybersecurity, awareness is more than half the problem. We trust you will find the threat data useful as you assess your own company’s risk. And to stay safe, consider these the steps to protect your brand and prevent online fraud:
- Monitor our threat data: Start by visiting the Global Fraud Index page. There you can quickly orient yourself around the index and our daily phishing and scam threat data. You’ll also be able to download our forthcoming 2022 State of Phishing and Online Fraud year-End Report, and subsequent quarterly reports for complete data sets.
- Assess your company’s risk: Start measuring risks to your online brand with our free, no obligation, Domain Risk Report and Domain Acquisition Analysis.Domain Risk Report – We’ll generate thousands of typosquatting variants based on your domain name and analyze each to see if they are active with A-records (web content) and/or MX-records (email capabilities). This will help you identify potential infringements and fraud campaigns currently underway.Domain Acquisition Analysis – We’ll scan 3,000+ top-level domains globally to determine typosquatting variants that are available for purchase and the associated costs to acquire them. This will help you scope your overall your attack surface and equip you with the data to reduce it.
- Test drive the Bolster platform – Schedule time with us to test drive the Bolster platform. See for yourself just how powerful the Bolster platform is and how you can put that power to work to protect your brand and business. We’re ready when you are.
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Resources:
Bolster Global Fraud Index
Bolster Brand Protection
Bolster Domain Monitoring
Bolster Fraud Prevention
Bolster Phishing & Scam Protection
