A new report from DNS theft protection and content filtering provider DNSFilter Inc. has found a significant surge in traffic to malicious sites containing threats in the six months to March.

The State of Internet Security Q1 ’23 report found that there was a 61% increase in traffic to sites with threats from October to March, but the traffic increase was much higher when it comes to sites identified as offering malicious phishing, malware, crypto scams and botnet traffic, which jumped 282%.

Reflecting a similar finding in a recent report from Cofense Inc., DNSFilter found that traffic to phishing sites alone was up 464% during the same period. The growth in phishing is said in the report to indicate that phishing is still a successful tactic for hackers and that businesses need to do more to educate their employees about these attacks.

Perhaps not surprisingly, phishing and deception attacks were found to target financial services at the highest rate, followed by retail and distribution and manufacturing. The financial sector saw nearly 83% of domain threats clicked attributed to phishing and deception, with software, hardware and technology companies showing a 39% click-thru rate.

Some 61% of domain threats targeted at healthcare and medical organizations were also clicked on. The report notes that healthcare and medical sector employees were twice as likely to click on a phishing link than employees in other sectors.

The report also found that 78% of threats were found in the DNS layer, indicating a need for information technology teams across industries to focus on their corporate networks.

“Organizations need to work securely, without the fear of being victimized by phishing, ransomware, or other DNS-based attacks,” the report notes. “These companies need to know they are protected by detecting and blocking threats and setting and enforcing content policies with real-time monitoring.”

DNSFilter was previously in the news in March when it announced a new joint solution with Banyan Security to simplify enterprise zero-trust security. The solution combines DNSFilter’s advanced threat detection and content filtering technology with Banyan Security’s remote access platform to provide the least privileged access to applications and services across hybrid and multicloud infrastructures.

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