Case Studies

Financial cyber threats

by Mark Rowe

Cybercriminals are trying harder than ever to steal confidential information and money from bank accounts, by mimicking financial organisations, it is claimed.

For the full report visit securelist.com

In 2013, 31.45 per cent of phishing attacks were trading on the names of leading banks, online stores and online payment systems – an increase of 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 pages imitating 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 alone Kaspersky Lab products protected about 39.6 million users from this cyber threat.

Phishing sites aimed at harvesting users’ financial details mainly use the brand names of popular online stores, online payment systems and online banking systems. In 2013, the most attractive targets were banks, which were used in 70.6 per cent of all financial phishing. That’s a sharp increase from 2012 when bank phishing represented just 52 per cent. Overall, fake bank websites were involved in twice as many (22.2 per cent) phishing attacks in 2013.

Phishing targets

In 2013, Kaspersky Lab heuristic anti-phishing technologies blocked a total of 330 million attacks, an increase of 22.2 per cent from the previous year.

Fraudsters use the brand names of major companies with large client databases in search of a big criminal profit. For example, about 60 per cent of all phishing attacks using fake bank pages exploited the names of just 25 organisations. Among online payment systems the phishers’ favourites are even more clearly-defined – 88.3 per cent of phishing attacks in this category involved one of four international brands: PayPal, American Express, MasterCard and Visa.

For several years in a row Amazon.com has been the most popular cover for phishing attacks exploiting the names of online stores. Over the reported period its name was used in 61 per cent of online trade-related phishing attacks. The top three also included Apple and eBay, but both of them lagged well behind Amazon.

Sergey Lozhkin, Senior Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab said: “Phishing attacks are so popular because they are simple to deploy and extremely effective. It is often not easy for even advanced Internet users to distinguish a well-designed fraudulent site from a legitimate page, which makes it even more important to install a specialised protection solution. In addition, phishing causes reputational and financial damage to organisations that see their brands exploited in phishing attacks.”

Phishers don’t just imitate the websites of financial institutions – they also frequently attack via social networking sites. In 2013, the number of attacks using fake pages of Facebook and other social networking sites grew by 6.8 percentage points and accounted for 35.4 per cent of the total.

The ‘Financial cyber threats in 2013’ report used data obtained voluntarily from Kaspersky Security Network participants.

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