According to a new blog post from researchers at Proofpoint, the UK is being targeted relentlessly by cybercriminals with malicious email.
Proofpoint researchers have uncovered that unsolicited email destined for recipients in the UK is more than four times more likely to contain a malicious URL than the United States, Germany or France, and unsolicited email sent to recipients in the UK is more than two times more likely to contain malicious URLs than those in the US. Conversely, unsolicited email in Germany and France is significantly less likely than even the US to contain malicious URLs, and almost five times less likely than the UK. In addition to this, on average an unsolicited email sitting in the Inbox of a user in the UK is more than five times more likely to contain a malicious URL than for a user in Germany.
In response to the findings of the blog, Kevin Epstein, VP of Advanced Security & Governance at Proofpoint, said: "Relative to other countries in this report, this is a startlingly high number of targeted attacks against the UK. Given the financial motivations of the attacks, this strongly suggests cybercriminals have found UK organisations to be an unusually lucrative target. "
Kevin Epstein also commented on the research relating to German organisations: "Unfortunately lower phishing volumes have not translated into lower impact; over 29 million Germans have fallen victim to cybercrime - almost 40% of the population. Attacks happen all the time and a brief lull in the summer months should not give organisations a false sense of security. Organisations need to be constantly vigilant of the dramatically rising trend of cybercrime over the last few years. According to recent reports, the German economy is the most targeted and most affected by cybercrime worldwide, measured against the gross national product."
In addition to this, Kevin also provided analysis on the impact of the research to French organisations:
"Based on the similarity of the French results to the US results, and the prevalence of well of publicized breaches in the US, there should be significant cause for concern among French security professionals. It is also worth noting that the results from France, Germany and the US are not particularly low; rather, the UK is unusually high."