Phishing attacks doubled in 2018
2018 saw 16% increase on the blocking of more fake sites than in the prior year. The number of phishing attacks per year has steadily been increasing in the recent years, but 2018 shows an even higher increase. You can find this information in Kaspersky Lab’s report: “Spam and Phishing in 2018.”
Phishing scams are one of the most versatile tactics you might come across, used for a variety of purposes. They may disguise themselves as something else and you might not even realise it. The easiest way to create a phishing page is to copy an existing website, then use that copy to trap innocent users. For example, if you want to replicate the login page of your ISP and trick customers into entering their bank account details, ensure you have all the contact information on the site already.
Over the past few years, phishing attacks have increased by 15 percent each year, culminating with a new record in 2018.
The finance sector was particularly hard hit: 44% of all detected Kaspersky Lab phishing attacks targeted banks, payment systems and online shops. That means that in 2018 the number of these sort of financial-oriented phishing attacks was the same as it totals to be worldwide.
“The increase in the number of phishing attacks may be influenced by the growing effectiveness of social engineering methods used to lure users to visit unsafe pages. 2018 marked the active exploitation of new schemes and tricks, such as misleading updates, combined with the refinement of traditional methods, such as scams during Black Friday and other national holidays. In conclusion, would-be hackers become better when they take advantage of important occasions around the world, such as the World Cup for national football teams,” said Tatyana Scherbakova, a security researcher at Kaspersky Lab.
Other findings of the 2018 spam and phishing report include:
The percentage of spam in email traffic reached 52.48%.
-
The largest source of spam this year was China (11.69%).
-
15% of spam emails were less than 2 KB in size.
-
Malicious spam frequently detected with the name WinCVE-2017-11882.
-
The Anti-Phishing system activated 482,465,211 times.
-
32% of unique users encountered phishing attacks.
Kaspersky Lab experts advise users to take the following measures to protect themselves from phishing attacks:
Always make sure that you check the email addresses in any unfamiliar messages to make sure they’re not fake, for example by checking the link or web address in a message. You should also check the sender’s email address.
-
If you are not sure that the site is genuine and secure, never enter your login details. If you think you may have entered your login and password on a fake site, change your password immediately and call your bank in case of card details’ compromise.
-
Always use a secure connection, especially when visiting sensitive websites. Don’t use unknown or public Wi-Fi not password protected. If you use an insecure connection, digital criminals can redirect you to phishing sites without your knowledge. For maximum protection, use VPN solutions that encrypt your traffic, such as Kaspersky Secure Connection.
-
Use a proper security solution with behavior-based anti phishing technologies, such as Kaspersky Security Cloud and Kaspersky Total Security, which will alert you if you try to visit a phishing site.
If you enjoyed this article, then you may also like this one.
Author: PC-GR
The World of Technology
