A fifth of phishing attacks directed at banks and financial organisations: report
27 Jun 2013
Banks and other financial organisations are direct targets of about 20 per cent of phishing attacks.
Every fifth phishing attack registered between May 2012 and late April 2013 targeted users of banks and other financial organisations, says net security firm Kaspersky Lab, in a research study into the evolution of phishing threats.
According to Kaspersky Lab, 20.64 per cent of all phishing threats registered between May 2012 and April 2013 were aimed at accounts of banks and other financial organisations worldwide.
The data received from Kaspersky Security Network is indirectly confirmed by the banks - according to the results of a global survey conducted in spring 2013 by B2B International and Kaspersky Lab, about 37 per cent of all banks surveyed were affected by phishing attacks at least once over the previous 12 months.
It was no surprise that banking and e-commerce had attracted unwanted criminal attention: even a successful attack on search pages, social networks or email can only yield personal data. To turn a profit, cybercriminals must find buyers for this information. However, successfully using fake online banking or shopping pages leads directly to earnings for the scammers.
Earlier, this week the company released a report which said 10,000 Indian internet users were facing phishing attacks from cybercriminals on a daily basis. In a phishing attack, criminals create a fake copy of any popular site and attempt to trick the 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 the firm's report, 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 was around 52,000.
