10 MILLION SUSPICIOUS MESSAGES SENT TO SAFEONWEB IN 2023
Last year, alert citizens sent us almost 10 million messages to suspicious@safeonweb.be. By 2022, that figure had already risen to 6 million. On average, we received 27,000 messages a day. February 2 2023, was a record day, with 65,645 messages!
Thanks to this information, we have been able to detect more than 1,200,000 suspicious links. Less attentive Internet users who click on such a link are redirected by us to a warning page and are therefore not victims of a scam.
A study we carried out (Safeonweb, 12/2023) revealed that 28% of Belgians have already sent a message to suspicious@safeonweb.be at least once. Thanks to all these e-mails, we can publish weekly alerts on Safeonweb.be, our Facebook page and our X account. We also distribute these messages via the Safeonweb application. In 2023, we published more than 75 alerts on the most common phishing messages.
We would like to thank all these dedicated citizens and encourage them to continue sending messages. The information sent by citizens helps us to detect suspicious messages quickly. From our point of view, people who forward messages are careful Internet users. They have not clicked thoughtlessly but have acted much more intelligently. We are convinced that people who forward messages are more critical than average and that it is highly unlikely that they will fall into the trap themselves. - Miguel De Bruycker, Director General of the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium.