Banks and Other Financial Institutions Increasingly Being Targeted By Phishing Attacks

According to the recent reports of Kaspersky Lab, banks and various other financial institutions are increasingly being hit by the phishing attacks, as they are the prime targets of the cybercriminals.

Kaspersky Lab has also mention that the repeated attacks on banks and various other financial institutions demand the need for stringent security measures to be adopted by the end users, specifically while shopping online or performing any other monetary transactions. The users should take extra care to safeguard their personal details like credit card number, name, password, phone numbers, PIN code, and e-mail addresses.

The security company says that their tech have prevented visiting phishing pages over 100 million times, out of which more than one-third (i.e. 35.7%) was from financial sector. IT industry is targeted in 13.83% of attacks, which is the second most. This statistics shows that there is a 12% rise as compared to the last quarter, which signifies an upsurge in cybercrime growth.

Between the time-period of April and June, there were around 60,000 attempts of visiting fraudulent web pages which included famous crypto-currency wallets and exchanges. Apart from the traditional phishing that helps in accessing the accounts of victim and their private key information, the cybercriminals attempt to force the victims to transfer crypto-currency to their accounts on their own.

As per Kaspersky Lab rough estimates, during the last quarter, the intruders have managed to earn a minimum of $2,329,317 from two tricks, not even including the revenues earned from the traditional phishing as posted on August 15, 2018, in itp.net. The two tricks that were used by the intruders are: free crypto-currency distribution and the second trick is for the scammers to exploit new ICO projects name to have funds from the potential investors.

As per the quarterly report, Ethereum (ETH) is the cryptocurrency that is currently most popular among the phishers as far as particular digital currencies are concerned.

As per the Kaspersky report, globally the phishing scams activities have been monitored maximum in South America and Asia. Brazil saw maximum phishing attacks (i.e. 15.51%) during the time-period of April and June, followed by China and Georgia (having 14.44% each). Kyrgyzstan and Russia comes in 4rth and 5th positions with 13.6% and 13.27%.

» SPAMfighter News - 8/23/2018