![Kaspersky Lab study: about one third of all phishing attacks aimed at stealing money Kaspersky Lab study: about one third of all phishing attacks aimed at stealing money](https://varindia.com/public/index.php/storage/news/uploads/2014/04/kespersky.jpg)
According to the data collected for Kaspersky Lab’s study ‘Financial cyber threats in 2013’,cybercriminals are trying harder than ever to acquire confidential user information and steal money from bank accounts by creating fake sites mimicking financial organizations. In 2013, 31.45% of phishing attacks were trading on the names of leading banks, online stores and e-payment systems, up 8.5 percentage points from the previous year.
Phishing is a fraudulent scheme used by cybercriminals to obtain confidential user data with the help of fake web pagesimitating Internet resources. Unlike malicious software created for particular operating systems, phishing attacks threaten all devices which can access web pages. That is why they are so popular with scammers – in 2013 aloneKaspersky Lab products protected about 39.6 million users from this cyber threat.
Phishingsitesaimedatharvestingusers’financialdetailsmainlyusethebrand names of popular online stores, e-payment systems and online banking systems. In 2013, the most attractive targets were banks, which were used in 70.6% of all financial phishing. That’s a sharp increase from 2012 when bank phishing represented just 52%. Overall, fake bank websites were involved in twice as many (22.2%) phishing attacks in 2013.
Fraudsters use the brand names of major companies with large client databases in search of a big criminal profit. For example, about 60% of all phishing attacks using fake bank pages exploited the names of just 25 organizations. Among e-payment systems the phishers’ “favorites” are even more clearly-defined: 88.3% of phishing attacks in this category involved one of four international brands: PayPal, American Express, MasterCard and Visa.
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