A new report by security outfit Cloudflare claims that the software king of the world, Microsoft is the world’s most impersonated brand.
Aside from impersonating Microsoft on several occasions, attackers use the company’s tools to commit fraud, the report said.
Cybercriminals posed as about 1,000 different organisations in almost a billion impersonation attempts against those using Cloudflare products. Notably, 51.7 per cent of the time, email attackers impersonated one of 20 well-known global brands, with Microsoft topping the charts.The number two spot on the list is acquired by WHO (World Health Organization) with runners-up being Google, SpaceX, and Salesforce.
In its 2023 Email Threat Report, Cloudflare found that attackers impersonated Salesforce the most in the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) category, followed by Notion, so and Box. Similarly, Mastercard is the most impersonated brand in the financial services sector.
Cloudflare recently detected and blocked a phishing campaign that used the Microsoft brand in a bid to harvest credentials via a legitimate but compromised website. The email had no text, but the entire body is a hyperlinked JPEG image.
The attack used Microsoft Office 365 branding and included brand information within the image. So, the receiver could inspect no plaintext or HTML text to identify the brand. However, Cloudflare used OCR (optical character recognition) to identify “Office 365” and “Microsoft” in the image. The image was hyperlinked to a Baidu URL.
