There has been a 640 per cent increase in phishing attempts and a 125 per cent increase in malware targeting Windows 7 last year, according to OpenText.

Its latest Webroot Threat Report is derived from metrics captured and analysed by the platform’s machine learning architecture, which also showed that one in four malicious URLs is hosted on an otherwise non-malicious domain, and 8.9 million URLs were found to be hosting a cryptojacking script.

“In the cyber security industry the only certainty is that there is no certainty, and there is no single silver bullet solution,” said Hal Lonas, senior vice president and and chief technology officer at OpenText.

“The findings underline why it’s critical that businesses and users of all sizes, ensure they’re not only protecting their data but also preparing for future attacks by taking simple steps toward cyber resilience.”

The top sites impersonated by phishing sites or cyber criminals were Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Google, PayPal and DropBox.

The top five kinds of websites impersonated by phishing sites were crypto exchanges (55 per cent), gaming (50 per cent), web email (40 per cent), financial institutions (40 per cent) and payment services (32 per cent).

The report also revealed that 93.6 percent of malware seen was unique to a single PC – the highest rate ever observed.

Meanwhile, 85 per cent of threats hide in one of four locations: ‘temp’, ‘appdata’, ‘cache’ and ‘windir’ – with more than half of threats (54 per cent) on business PCs hiding in temp folders.

IP addresses associated with Windows exploits also grew by 360 per cent, with the majority of exploits targeting out-of-date operating systems.

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