Every fifth (20.64 per cent) phishing attack registered between May 2012 and late April 2013 targeted users of banks and other financial organisations. That figure emerged from research into the evolution of phishing threats carried out by Kaspersky Lab specialists, using data from the cloud-based Kaspersky Security Network.
The data received from Kaspersky Security Network is indirectly confirmed by the banks – according to the results of a global survey in Spring 2013 by B2B International and Kaspersky Lab, about 37 per cent of all banks surveyed were affected by phishing attacks at least once over the previous 12 months.
It’s no surprise that banking and e-commerce has attracted unwanted criminal attention. Even a successful attack on search pages, social networks or email can only yield personal data. To turn a profit, cyber criminals must find buyers for this information. However, using fake online banking or shopping pages leads to earnings for the scammers.
Despite the widespread dangers of phishing attacks, simply installing a security product with the necessary functionality to protect financial operations will protect even the most inexperienced users when conducting transactions online.
Online banking
Kaspersky Lab’s products for home users – Kaspersky Internet Security and Kaspersky PURE – protect online financial operations by implementing our Safe Money technology. A key feature of the technology is that it was developed based on analysis of the techniques used by fraudsters to attack users of online banking services and online stores.
Among its arsenal of protection technologies, Safe Money includes advanced anti-phishing features. For example, the technology prevents the execution of any potentially dangerous code in the browser, thus protecting the user against XSS attacks and attempts to automatically download malware from an infected site. Additionally, the technology checks that users are entering legitimate sites, thanks to its constantly updated database of trusted websites and phishing URLs. At the same time, the heuristic mechanisms integrated in the Kaspersky Lab products can effectively detect malicious links even if they are not included in the database.
Safe Money technology was first introduced in 2012 as part of Kaspersky Internet Security 2013. Learn more at www.kaspersky.co.uk.
