Almost half of all phishing attacks, which involved fraudulent email messages or copycat websites that appear legitimate, registered in 2016 by heuristic detection technologies looked to steal their target’s funds.
Last year, Woburn, Mass.-based Kaspersky Lab’s anti-phishing technologies detected almost 155 million user attempts to visit different kinds of phishing pages.
Of those, almost 50% of heuristic detections attempted to visit a financial phishing page, i.e. where the aim was to obtain valuable personal information from users, such as financial account numbers, credit accounts, social security numbers, and login and passwords to access online banking.
The cybercriminals intended to use this information to steal money from their victims. This is the highest share of financial phishing registered to date by Kaspersky Lab.
Compared to 2015, the amount of financial phishing attacks increased by 13.14% in 2016 to comprise 47.48% percent of all phishing attacks blocked by heuristic detection technologies.
Banking phishing schemes are the absolute leaders among all types of financial phishing.
Every fourth (25.76%) attack used fake online banking information, or other content related to banks – a result that is 8.31% higher than in 2015.
The share of phishing related to payment systems and e-shops accounted for 11.55% and 10.14% respectively, an increase of 3.75% and 1.09% compared to 2015. The share of financial phishing detected on MacOS computers was 31.38%.
“It’s clear that financial cybercriminals are increasingly on the look-out for new ways to exploit users and extract money from them,” Kaspersky reported in its blog.
Financial phishers, according to Kaspersky Lab, are particularly keen to use data related to top multi-national banks, popular payment systems and internet shops and auctions from the U.S., China and Brazil in their scams.
The list of brands used stays the same from year to year, as their popularity remains high and they are therefore a lucrative target for cybercriminals.
In 2016 the number of users attacked with malware targeting financial data started increasing once more, following a decrease in 2014 and 2015. In 2016 the number of users attacked with banking Trojans increased by 30.55% to reach 1,088,900. Some 17.17% of users attacked with banking malware were corporate users.
Attacked most often by banking malware: users in Russia, Germany, Japan, India, Vietnam and the U.S. The most widespread banking malware family: Zbot with 44.08% of attacked users.
“Financial phishing has always been one of the easiest ways for cybercriminals to earn illegal money,” Nadezhda Demidova, senior web content analyst at Kaspersky Lab, said.
“You don’t have to be a skilled programmer, and you don’t have to invest lots of money into supporting infrastructure. Of course, most phishing schemes are easy to recognize and avoid, but judging by what we see in our statistics, lots of people are still not cautious enough when it comes to dealing with financial data online. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have seen so many attacks in 2016.”
In order to protect themselves from phishing, Kaspersky Lab experts advise users to take the following measures:
- When paying online always check the legitimacy of the website. HTTPS should protect the connection, and the domain should belong to the same organization.
- Always check the legitimacy of emails that come from famous brands. Even if it encourages someone to do something urgently, like change a password.
- Don’t click the links in emails or web-pages if you have doubts about their legitimacy.
- Use a proven security solution with behavior-based anti-phishing technologies that can identify even the most recent phishing scams.
