Johannesburg - According to the Kaspersky Consumer Security Risks survey carried out by B2B International with Kaspersky Lab in 2013, approximately 30 percent of users have received bogus emails claiming to come from banks.
The fraudsters often use fake notifications from banks in order to trick users into handing over account credentials and giving away access to their money.
Various services for online transactions (e-banking, e-payment systems and online stores) are now an intrinsic part of modern life for many users.
The B2B International survey shows that 95 percent of respondents have been online shopping, 91 percent have used the services of online banking and 74 percent have used e-payment systems. This trend would never escape the fraudsters’ attention.
According to the survey, 30 percent of users have received emails allegedly coming from a bank which turned out to be bogus forgeries.
About 22 percent of respondents reported suspicious messages supposedly sent on behalf of an online store. Every tenth user (10 percent of those surveyed) had been automatically redirected at least once to a suspicious site asking them to enter their credit card credentials.
Nearly six percent of respondents stated that they have entered financial information on dubious sites. These are all examples of the activity of cybercriminals engaged in phishing, one of many types of malicious attacks targeting important confidential financial data: credit card numbers, logins and passwords to online banking accounts, etc.
Although many experienced and cautious users probably recognise most phishing attempts, these attacks often end in success: about four percent of respondents reported that they had lost money to cybercriminals.
Statistically, four percent is a relatively small figure, however when so many users are attacked each year, even a small success rate translates into big money.
According to The Evolution of Phishing Attacks 2011-2013 survey, among the users of the cloud service Kaspersky Security Network, 21 percent of phishing attacks performed between April and May 2012-2013, involved fake pages of banks and other financial organisations.
In absolute figures it means that within just one year 7.5 million users worldwide faced financial phishing.
In other words, as in the real world, virtual fraud poses serious dangers which can be only combated with the help of special protection.