Indian users vulnerable to phishing attacks from cybercriminals: Kaspersky

Around 10,000 Indian internet users face phishing attacks from cybercriminals every day. In a phishing attack, criminals create a fake copy of any popular site and attempt to trick users into visiting the fake web pages. The website could be an email service, an internet banking sites or even a popular networking site.

According to Kasperky, the net security firm, on an average the world witnessed 1.02 lakh phishing attacks each day last year. "In 2012-2013, 102,100 users around the world were subjected to phishing attacks on a daily basis. In Russia, 19,000 users were attacked each day, 12,000 in the US, 10,000 in India, 6,000 in Germany, 3,000 in France, and another 3,000 in the UK," said the report.

The figures though were much lower than in 2011-12. Over the period, the number of users under phishing attacks daily were around 52,000.

"Overall, the volume and intensity of phishing attacks have more than doubled over the past two years," it said. The figures for the number of users under phishing attacks in 2012-2013 was 37.3 million users around the world up 87 per cent from 2011-2012.

Kaspersky Lab managing director, Harry Cheung, told thinkdigit's Jayesh Shinde  in a interview that the web security firm detected some 200,000 malicious programmes every day. He added, in the coming days there would be phenomenal increase in the use of mobile devices, with augmented reality devices mostly replacing today's ultra-popular smartphones, laptops, PCs, and a a steep rise in the number of attacks on mobile devices, cloud infrastructures and OS specific attacks like Android OS specific attacks could be expected.

Cheung added, people would be connected to internet 24/7 with more and more content / data shared and stored offline and online including personal, financial information and online accounts info. He said attackers follow users wherever they went and shared their valuable information.

''Let me tell you that Kaspersky was first to identify Red October - elusive cyber-espionage campaign targeting diplomatic, governmental and scientific research organizations in several countries for at least five years. We were the first to report Flame – which was designed for Highly Targeted Cyber Espionage Operations, Duqu- sophisticated Trojan and Gauss which was designed to Monitor Online Banking Accounts. We have the most powerful product line available to safeguard users from the latest and evolving cyber threats. We are here to save the world! So we will continue to equip our solution with the innovative and efficient features to protect our users from cyber threats and criminals.''

Replying to a question as to why India was consistently ranked as the top spam-producing nation in the world and whether something was fundamentally wrong here, he said, spam levels had decreased and India was not at the top. It was now China.

He said from the spam report of 2012 at close of 2012, the percentage of spam settled at 72.1 per cent, or 8.2 per cent less than in 2011, adding there had been continual and considerable decrease in spam volumes which was unprecedented. Further, the average percentage of spam in 2012 was substantially lower than in 2010 (82.2 per cent) and 2011 (80.3 per cent) with 2012 seeing some major changes among the countries from which spam originated.

According to Cheung, China which did not even figure in the Top 20 sources of spam in 2011, took first place in 2012, accounting for 19.5 per cent of all spam. Spam originating in the US was up 13.5 percentage points, to 15.6 per cent - enough to take second place.

He said Asia remained the leading region for spam distribution, but the interesting fact was China took first place while the previous leaders in that region such as India, Indonesia, and South Korea lost ground.