Kaspersky says that Phishing is Most Prevalent Attack Vector in May 2014

According to monthly report on online threats of Kaspersky Lab, during May 2014 the number of fake email dropped by 1.3% as compared to April 2014 but phishing was still the most prevalent type of attack followed by strains of a Zeus/Zbot dropper.

As accords to the report, the average weekly spam percentage in the month of May was 69.8% but during third week of the month, the number of spam email rose to 72.1%.

Spammers tried to take advantage of all popular events like celebration of Mother's Day which was perfect opportunity to lure victims with promises for discount and make some money. The URLs provided on the body of the message directed to new domains which was different from the advertised one in the email.

Spammers targeted Gardening hobbyists with offers for seeds for lawns, flowers and fruits which led to domains created less than a week before.

Victims were attracted in other ways which included advertisements for distance learning programs and also for getting degree (honorary doctor) by making donation to a church.

However, maximum percentage of fake emails contained malicious programs and Kaspersky detected Trojan-Spy.HTML.Fraud.gen as the common threat in the list of top ten comprising nearly 3% of the spam cases.

Normally, cyber crooks try to embezzle details of user's bank card with the aid of specialized Trojan programs and Zeus (Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot) was once more the most common banking Trojan during mid-April to mid-May.

As per Kaspersky Lab's research, the program was drawn in in 198,200 malware attacks on online banking patrons. Nearly 82,300 users were hit by malicious programs namely Trojan-Banker.Win32.Lohmys and Trojan-banker.Win32.ChePro which are spread through spam emails entitled "Internet bank charges".

Also phishers did not change much in frequently targeting organizations during May 2014. Email search sites (32.2%) stood first followed by Social networks (23.9%) and Financial and Payment organizations (12.8%) which filled the top three positions.

Kaspersky claims that it obstructed 21.5 Million of these phishing attacks and approximately 10% of them (nearly 2 million) bank card details of targeted user during the reported period as phishing attacks are another type of stealing banking data.

» SPAMfighter News - 7/11/2014