Summary of The Kaspersky Report On The Evolution of Phishing Attacks

The report from Kaspersky Labs is on the evolution of phishing attacks from 2011-2013. The information was collected from the Kaspersky Security Network cloud service used to gain a better understanding of the global landscape of phishing threats from a variety of angles. It is important to note that this study addressed only attacks that were intercepted using heuristic security technologies built into Kaspersky Lab products. The report does not provide data about the number of successful phishing attacks, or attacks that are launched against those who are not using Kaspersky Lab security solutions.

This report from Kaspersky Labs is on the evolution of phishing attacks from 2011-2013. The information was collected from the Kaspersky Security Network cloud service used to gain a better understanding of the global landscape of phishing threats from a variety of angles. It is important to note that this study addressed only attacks that were intercepted using heuristic security technologies built into Kaspersky Lab products. The report does not provide data about the number of successful phishing attacks, or attacks that are launched against those who are not using Kaspersky Lab security solutions. Key highlights of the report include the following:

• 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) 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