The number of phishing attacks has risen to 37,3 million

The number of phishing attacks on Internet users worldwide has increased to 12 million in the last 37,3 months, from 19,9 million a year earlier, according to a Kaspersky Lab survey.

Most phishing attacks took place on the interfaces of email services, social networking sites, banks, financial institutions, and webshops, the end-user security solutions company said in a statement on Friday.

87 percent of the attacks affected those who had previously been targeted by cybercriminals on Facebook, Yahoo, Google and Amazon.

A survey conducted in June 2013 shows that some spam emails have started to grow and mutate rapidly due to new and varied methods by cybercriminals.

Phishing attacks launched in the last year have affected an average of 102 people a day worldwide, twice as many as a year earlier. Phishing attacks were most often launched against citizens of Russia, the United States, India, Vietnam, and the United Kingdom. The number of attacks in Vietnam, the United States, India and Germany has doubled over the previous year. Most phishing servers are registered in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, and India.

Most often, applications from Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and Amazon were attacked, accounting for 30 percent of phishing attacks. In 20 percent of cases, the websites of banks and other financial organizations were copied by fraudsters. The top 30 targeted websites include names like American Express, PayPal, Xbox Live and Twitter.

Twelve percent of all registered phishing attacks came to victims through spam, and 12 percent reached links through links, browsers, or messaging systems (Skype).

Internet scammers most of the time create a completely similar and popular but fake website (email mail system, internet banking interface, social networking sites) that can be used to convince victims that they are on the real side. Unsuspecting users provide their personal information and secret passwords, which can be misused by fraudsters to cause further material damage. [MTI]