Something Smells Phishy: 2013 Cybersecurity Report

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2013 Cybersecurity report: A rise in the number of threats aimed at accessing sensitive information and bank acounts * Phishing attacks.

A third of the phishing attacks carried out by hackers were aimed at stealing money from bank acounts. There’s a constantly growing number of attempts by cyber-criminals to gain access to sensitive information and steal money through fake internet websites of financial institutions.

These are the main findings included in the Kaspersky Labs 2013 cybersecurity report covering financial cyber threats. During 2013 more than 30% of attacks of this kind were based on using the names of leading banks, online stores and digital payment systems, a rise of 8.5% compared to 2012.

Phishing is a type of fraud used by criminals to gain access to sensitive information through fake internet websites. Phishing threatens every device capable of internet access, and during 2013 Kaspersky Lab protected more than 40 million users from this sort of threat. Phishing websites are aimed at stealing personal financial details of users, hiding behind the brand names of online stores, digital payment systems and online banking systems.

iHLS – Israel Homeland Security

More than 88% of phishing attacks used one of these four famous, international brand names: American Express, Paypal, Mastercard and Visa. Criminals have also used the Amazon brand name as a cover for online fraud for several years.

Sergei Luzkin, Kaspersky Lab representative, explained that phishing attacks are popular due to their simplicity and effectiveness. “Users find it difficult to distinguish between a carefully prepared, fake website and a real one.”

The same criminals also tend to use social networks as a means of attack: During 2013 the number of attacks utilizing fake pages of Facebook or other social networks increased by 16.8%, comprising about 35% of the total number of attacks.