One third of phishing attacks aimed at stealing money
According to data collected as part of Kaspersky Lab’s ‘Financial cyber threats in 2013′ study, cybercriminals are trying harder than ever to acquire confidential user information and steal money from bank accounts by creating fake sites mimicking financial organizations.
In 2013, 31.45 per cent of phishing attacks were trading on the names of leading banks, online stores and online payment systems – an increase of 8.5 percentage points from the previous year.
Phishing sites aimed at harvesting users’ financial details mainly use the brand names of popular online stores, online payment systems and online banking systems. In 2013, the most attractive targets were banks, which were used in 70.6 per cent of all financial phishing. That’s a sharp increase from 2012 when bank phishing represented just 52 per cent. Overall, fake bank websites were involved in twice as many (22.2 per cent) phishing attacks in 2013.
In 2013, Kaspersky Lab blocked a total of 330 million attacks, an increase of 22.2 per cent from the previous year.
Fraudsters use the brand names of major companies with large client databases in search of a big criminal profit. For example, about 60 per cent of all phishing attacks using fake bank pages exploited the names of just 25 organisations. Among online payment systems the phishers’ favourites are even more clearly-defined – 88.3 per cent of phishing attacks in this category involved one of four international brands: PayPal, American Express, MasterCard and Visa.
For several years in a row Amazon.com has been the most popular cover for phishing attacks exploiting the names of online stores. Over the reported period its name was used in 61 per cent of online trade-related phishing attacks. The Top 3 also included Apple and eBay, but both of them lagged well behind Amazon.
“Phishing attacks are so popular because they are simple to deploy and extremely effective. It is often not easy for even advanced Internet users to distinguish a well-designed fraudulent site from a legitimate page, which makes it even more important to install a specialised protection solution. In addition, phishing causes reputational and financial damage to organisations that see their brands exploited in phishing attacks,” commented Sergey Lozhkin, Senior Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab.
Phishers don’t just imitate the websites of financial institutions – they also frequently attack via social networking sites. In 2013, the number of attacks using fake pages of Facebook and other social networking sites grew by 6.8 percentage points and accounted for 35.4 per cent of the total.
The ‘Financial cyber threats in 2013’ report used data obtained voluntarily from Kaspersky Security Network participants. Kaspersky Security Network is a globally distributed cloud-based infrastructure designed to quickly process depersonalised data about threats which users of Kaspersky Lab’s products encounter. Statistics about phishing attacks were obtained based on Kaspersky Lab web anti-phishing detections.