Found out 92% of malware comes through email attachments

I was reading through a Verizon data breach report last night and that stat jumped out at me. 92% of malware gets delivered via email. Not sketchy downloads or dodgy websites. Just someone clicking a PDF or Word doc they weren't expecting. I've been telling people to watch out for phishing for years but I never realized the numbers were that bad. Makes me wonder how many breaches could be stopped if everyone just double checked the sender before opening stuff. Has anyone else seen a breakdown on which file types are the worst for this?

2 comments

2 Comments

jamieperez1mo ago

Yeah, "someone clicking a PDF or Word doc they weren't expecting" is exactly what bit us at my last job. We had a guy open a PDF that looked like an invoice from a vendor we actually used, and it locked up half our shared drives for two days. After that mess, we started using a simple rule: if an attachment shows up without a heads-up in the email body first, don't open it. I also switched our team to opening PDFs in the browser preview instead of downloading them right away, and it cut down on the sketchy stuff we saw. For file types, .docm and .pdf are the worst in my experience, but .zip files with executables inside are a close second.

the_michael1mo ago

Whoa wait, 92 percent? That's insane. I knew phishing was bad but almost all of it coming through email attachments is wild.