Netskope: Attackers double down on social engineering techniques and malicious functionalities leading to sharp increase in malware downloads

Netskope: Attackers double down on social engineering techniques and malicious functionalities leading to sharp increase in malware downloads

UAE, Dubai: – Netskope, a leader in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), today unveiled new research confirming that attackers are finding new ways to evade detection and blend in with normal network traffic using HTTP and HTTPS to deliver malware. In its latest Cloud & Threat Report: Global Cloud and Web Malware Trends, Netskope identified that on average, five out of every 1,000 enterprise users attempted to download malware in Q1 2023, and new malware families and variants represented 72% of those malware downloads.

Social Engineering and Search Engine Data Voids on the Rise

In the research, Netskope uncovered that nearly 10% of all malware downloads in Q1 were referred from search engines. These downloads mostly resulted from weaponized data voids, or combinations of search terms that have very few results, which means that any content matching those terms is likely to appear very high in the search results. This represents just one of many social engineering techniques that attackers are accelerating.

Social engineering as a whole continues to dominate as a leading malware infiltration technique with attackers abusing not only search engines, but email, collaboration apps, and chat apps to trick their victims. As the top two malware types, Trojans accounted for