This year's trend of fast growth in phishing attacks quarter over quarter continues
Woburn, MA – November 6, 2018 – Today, Kaspersky Lab is announcing the availability of its Spam and Phishing in Q3 2018 report, which found that the company’s anti-phishing system prevented more than 137,382,124 attempts to visit fraudulent web pages. This amount continues the trend in fast growth of phishing attacks seen quarter over quarter in 2018.
With the continual increase in phishing attacks this year, in the third quarter, the number of phishing attempts exceed the amount in Q2 (107,785,069) by 27.5 percent. During the quarter, the financial segment was hit especially hard with more than a third of all the phishing attacks aimed at banks, payment systems and e-commerce organizations. This activity also proves further development of a trend Kaspersky Lab experts found in Q2, in which the figure was over 20 percent.
The country with the highest percentage of users attacked in Q3 was Guatemala with almost 19 percent, surpassing the leader of a previous quarter – Brazil. This country saw the second highest percentage of users attacked with 18.6 percent. The third place was taken by Spain, with 17.5 percent of users subjected to phishing attacks.
“We’ve been witnessing a rise in the number of phishing attempts for a while now,” said Nadezhda Demidova, security researcher at Kaspersky Lab. “Many factors influence such growth, like fraudsters’ ability to keep coming up with new schemes and tricks. They also borrow the ideas from foreign ‘colleagues’ to use on local markets as a means of communication, which further helps their technologies develop. For example, in Q3 they actively directed users to the fraudulent website with transmitters and scam-notifications, as well as by exploiting the new iPhone release as a news hook. As new technological and informational updates appear, phishers begin to exploit them.”
Kaspersky Lab experts advise users to take the following measures to protect themselves from phishing:
- Always check the link address and if the sender’s email is genuine before clicking anything. Even more, do not click the link, but type it into the browser’s address line instead to be sure that the name of link in the message doesn’t cover another hyperlink.
- If you are not sure that the website/sender is real and safe, do not enter your credentials, and if you think you may have entered your login and password on a fake page, immediately change your password.
- Only use a secure connection – especially when you visit sensitive websites. In addition, do not use unknown or public Wi-Fi without password protection.
- For maximum protection, use VPN solutions that encrypt your traffic, such as Kaspersky Secure Connection. If you are using an insecure connection, cybercriminals can unnoticeably redirect you to phishing pages.
- Use a proper security solution with behavior-based anti-phishing technologies, such as Kaspersky Security Cloud and Kaspersky Total Security, which will warn you and protect you if you are attempting to visit a phishing web page.
Find more details about spam and phishing in Q3 2018 on Securelist.com.
About Kaspersky Lab
Kaspersky Lab is a global cybersecurity company, which has been operating in the market for over 20 years. Kaspersky Lab’s deep threat intelligence and security expertise is constantly transforming into next generation security solutions and services to protect businesses, critical infrastructure, governments and consumers around the globe. The company’s comprehensive security portfolio includes leading endpoint protection and a number of specialized security solutions and services to fight sophisticated and evolving digital threats. Over 400 million users are protected by Kaspersky Lab technologies and we help 270,000 corporate clients protect what matters most to them. Learn more at www.kaspersky.com.
Kaspersky Lab Media Contact:
Denise Berard
781.503.1836
Denise.Berard@kaspersky.com
