Nearly a third of all phishing attacks in 2013 were aimed at stealing money, with cybercriminals trading under the names of major banks, according to internet security firm Kaspersky.
According to the company these phishing rates are up 8.5 per cent year-on-year.
“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.. In addition, phishing causes reputational and financial damage to organisations that see their brands exploited in phishing attacks,” said Sergey Lozhkin, senior security researcher at Kaspersky Lab.
“Unlike malicious software created for particular operating systems, phishing attacks threaten all devices which can access web pages. That is why they are so popular with scammers,” Kaspersky said.
Sites aimed at harvesting financial details mainly use the brand names of popular online stores, e-payment systems and online banking systems.
Kaspersky said in 2013 banks were targeted in over 70 per cent of all financial phishing incidents, increasing from 52 per cent in 2012.
“Overall, fake bank websites were involved in twice as many (22.2%) phishing attacks in 2013,” the company said.
“About 60 per cent of all phishing attacks using fake bank pages exploited the names of just 25 organisations. Among e-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.”
The top three organisations being targeted by phishing fraudsters for the past few years have been Amazon, Apple and eBay.
Image courtesy of Shuttershock
