The number of Internet users, faced with phishing attacks over the past 12 months increased by 87% – from 19.9 to 37.3 million.
Most often the victims of cyber threats become residents of Russia (19%), the USA (12.5%), India (10%), Vietnam (3.35%), the UK (3.25%) and Ukraine (2.25%). These are the results of the study “The Evolution of phishing attacks in 2011-2013.” Conducted by “Kaspersky Lab” in June 2013 based on data from the cloud monitoring system of Kaspersky Security Network.
Phishing – a diagram of Internet fraud in which criminals create a fake copy of a popular site (e-mail service, online banking, social networks, etc.) and the different ways to try to lure users to the Internet. The purpose of phishing attacks – get valuable user data: personal data, information for accessing banking services and accounts in social networks. Subsequently, it includes sending malicious or self-use collected information to steal the victim’s money, as well as the spread of spam and malware through compromised accounts in the mail or social networks, or resell the information to other criminals.
For a long time a kind of phishing threats remained specific to e-mail spam. However, data obtained in the course of the study, said that phishing attacks have reached such proportions that it is correct to consider them as a separate dangerous threat. So, for example, phishing attacks, organized through mass mailings in the past year had a little more than 12% of the total registered attacks. In all other cases, 88% of users have experienced with links to phishing pages do not use e-mail, for example, in the process of surfing the Web, when communicating on the Internet (via Skype, etc.) and the use of social networks.
In the study, the specialists of “Kaspersky Lab” analyzed data on phishing attacks received from more than 50 million users of Kaspersky Security Network in the period from 1 May 2012 to 30 April 2013 and compared them with the data for the same time period 2011-2012.
According to the results of the analysis, it was revealed that for period 2012-2013, the daily phishing attacks were exposed to 102.1 thousand users worldwide, and it is almost twice as much for the same previous period. Leaders in the growing number of people were attacked by four countries: Vietnam, the United States, India and Germany – here it increased by more than 100%. In Ukraine, it was 41%.
Most of the servers that host the phishing pages are registered in the U.S., UK, Germany, Russia and India. And more than half (57%) of all identified sources of attacks are unique in the entire 10 countries. Ukraine in this list took the 9th line with the figure of 2.5%. The number of these same sources of attacks in the period from 2012 to 2013 increased more than 3 times.
The main objectives of attackers were among the most popular online resources: Yahoo!, Google, Facebook and Amazon. These services accounted for over 30% of all phishing incidents. At the same time, more than 20% of all attacks were committed for banks and other credit and financial institutions. In thirty of the most counterfeited resources were also American Express, PayPal, Xbox live and Twitter.
