NEWS AND NOTES RELEVANT TO CYBER/DATA SECURITY AND COMPLIANCE

Phishing attacks are on the rise, and show no signs of slowing down: Nearly 1.4 million new, unique phishing sites are created each month, according to the Webroot QuarterlyThreat Trends Report, released Thursday. In May, this figure reached a high of 2.3 million sites created, the report found.

Today's phishing attacks are highly targeted, sophisticated, and difficult to detect, making them increasingly hard to avoid. The phishing sites being built each day appear to be realistic, and are almost impossible to find using web crawlers, the report stated. And instead of randomly targeting large groups of people, hackers now use social engineering to individualize attacks.

Here are the top 10 companies that phishing attackers impersonated in the first six months of 2017:

1. Google (35%)

2. Chase (15%)

3. Dropbox (13%)

4. PayPal (10%)

5. Facebook (7%)

6. Apple (6%)

7. Yahoo (4%)

8. Wells Fargo (4%)

9. Citi (3%)

10. Adobe (3%)

Users should be wary if they receive an email that appears to be from any of these sources that asks them to click on a link or download a file. MORE