The statistic that cybercriminals have been unleashing 18 million phishing emails laced with malware on a daily basis into cyberspace during the pandemic is mind boggling and one that executives should pay attention to when prioritizing resources for user education. Math was never my strongest subject, but the math of 18 million malicious emails targeted at all of us on a daily basis is a LOT.

A new study rolled out by Google, in collaboration with researchers at Stanford University, studied over a billion malicious emails and targets that Google had identified and blocked over a period of five months, to get more intelligence about who was being targeted and how the campaigns were targeting users. The study found that users in the U.S. were targeted more than any others in the world, followed by the United Kingdom and Japan.

The study found that the most effective phishing scams were fast and short lived, lasting one to three days. They found that over 100 million malicious emails were launched in these short time frames. In addition, they found that if a user’s email address or personal information had been previously compromised, they were five times more likely to be targeted by a phishing scheme. The study also concluded that users aged 55 to 64 were 1.64 times more likely to be targeted by cybercriminals than 18-24 year olds.

The statistic is astounding, but the results of the analysis are very informative for businesses. The take away is that the number of phishing schemes continue to rise, user education continues to be essential in protecting company data against these schemes, and education is particularly important depending on users’ age.