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Phishing Attacks Increase: How to protect yourself and your business

June 25, 2013

CyberheistNews Vol 3, 26

KnowBe4

"Train Or Feel The Pain"

More users than ever are experiencing phishing attack attempts. Researchers at Kaspersky Lab have documented a drastic increase in the number of web users who have been "subjected" to phishing attacks over the past year, according to a new report. 

The Moscow-headquartered security firm found that 37.3 million people faced the prospect of being phished in 2012 to present day, a whopping 87 percent increase over the same period between 2011 and 2012. In its "The Evolution of Phishing Attacks" study; Kaspersky Lab studied threats faced by roughly 50 million customers running its security products. 

The Main Findings: 

* In 2012-2013, 37.3 million users around the world were subjected to phishing attacks — up 87% from 2011-2012
* Most often, phishing attacks targeted users in Russia, the US, India, Vietnam and the UK
* Phishing attacks were most frequently launched from the US, the UK, Germany, Russia and India
* Yahoo!, Google, Facebook and Amazon are top targets of malicious users. Online game services, online payment systems, and the websites of banks and other credit and financial organizations are also common targets
* Over 20% of all attacks targeted banks and other credit and financial organizations
* The number of distinct sources of attacks in 2012 and 2013 increased 3.3 times
* More than one-half (56.1%) of all identified sources of phishing attacks were located in just 10 countries
* In 2012-2013, 102,100 Internet users around the world were subjected to phishing attacks every day. This is double the amount of intended victims over the previous period
* More than 50% of the total number of individual targets (921 names out of 1,739 in the KSN database) were fake copies of the websites of banks and other credit and financial organizations
* Phishing has some local accents: phisher targets are different from country to country, depending on the popularity of local online resources. 

And that is why "Train Or Feel The Pain" is so relevant these days. You -have- to train all employees from the Board down to the mail room to not fall for social engineering tricks. Here is the Kaspersky PDF:
http://media.kaspersky.com/pdf/Kaspersky_Lab_KSN_report_The_Evolution_of_Phishing_Attacks_2011-2013.pdf



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