Over 1/3 of phishing attacks target financial sector customers in Q2

The second quarter of 2018 witnessed over 107 million attempts to visit phishing pages, of which 35.7 percent were related to financial services and targeting customers through fake banking or payment pages.

According to a statement by Kaspersky Labs, the attack on financial services comprised of attacks on features banks, online shops, and payment systems.

The IT sector was the second hardest hit, with 13.83 of attacks targeting tech companies, which is 12.28 percentage points more in comparison with the previous quarter, according to Kaspersky Lab's 'Spam and phishing in Q2 2018' report.

The phishing attack includes theft of money as well as of personal data by creating fake pages of banking, payment or shopping sites. Thereon intruders harvest sensitive information from unaware victims such as their name, password, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, credit card number, and PIN code.

Brazil remained the country with the most significant share of users attacked by phishers in the second quarter of 2018 followed by China, Georgia, Kirghizstan, and Russia. Moreover, China became the most popular source of spam, overtaking the U.S. and Germany. The country most targeted by malicious emails was Germany, once followed by Russia, United Kingdom, Brazil, and Italy.

Interestingly, there were almost 60,000 attempts to visit fraudulent web pages featuring popular crypto-currency wallets and exchanges. Here cybercriminals try forcing their victims to independently transfer crypto-currency to them. One of the tricks is the free distribution of the crypto-currency. Another trick is for scammers to exploit the names of new ICO projects to raise funds from potential investors.

"The permanence of attacks targeting financial organizations reflects the fact that more and more people are using electronic money. Still, not all of them are sufficiently aware of the possible risks. Therefore, intruders are deliberately trying to steal sensitive information through phishing," said Nadezhda Demidova, lead web content analyst at Kaspersky Lab.