Channel revenue sales for anti-spam products have increased nearly 524% for the year-to-date (YTD) compared to the same period in 2020, as companies battle a surge in phishing attempts, according to Context.
Context’s figures for revenue through European IT distribution for the period put the anti-spam monitoring/filtering sub-category of cloud security way out in front of the rest.
Related categories which have also performed well so far this year are data protection (102%) and mail security (30%).
The increase in demand could be linked to a renewed effort from cyber-criminals to capitalise via phishing attacks on interest in vaccine roll-outs and government schemes to reopen European economies. When aimed at employees, these attacks are typically designed to trick users into divulging corporate log-ins and other sensitive information, or else to click on malicious links or open attachments which may trigger a covert malware download.
According to UK government figures, 83% of businesses that admitted suffering a security breach last year were hit by phishing attacks, followed by 27% that categorised the attack as “impersonation”.
“Phishing is involved in a large percentage of data breaches, and concerns are mounting over the impact on corporate finances and reputation, so we’re seeing strong growth in cloud-based anti-spam, data protection and email security products,” says Joe Turner, manager: research and business development at Context.
“However, it’s important to remember that one of the biggest and most unpredictable risk factors in corporate cybersecurity is users, so any product investments should be accompanied by a renewed focus on employee training and awareness raising programmes.”
The cloud security segment in general has had a strong start to the year, recording year-on-year growth of over 22% (YTD).
Endpoint security (-11%) and network security (-3,5%) performed less well, although this is to be expected given the huge surge in sales during March/April last year when countries first went into lockdown, making comparisons less favourable.
Another well performing sub-category in the cloud security space is control management, which recorded a year-on-year revenue growth of just over 104%. This can be linked to demand from hospitals and public sector institutions for security for their PaaS and IaaS platforms.