Financial phishing skyrockets, Kaspersky says

According to Andrew Potgieter, security solutions director at Westcon: “Recent data released from Kaspersky Lab suggests that there was recently a 7.9% increase in the amount of scam emails that make use of the names of reputable banks, payment services, online stores and similar organisations. The figures are staggering and the team advises that these […]

According to Andrew Potgieter, security solutions director at Westcon: “Recent data released from Kaspersky Lab suggests that there was recently a 7.9% increase in the amount of scam emails that make use of the names of reputable banks, payment services, online stores and similar organisations. The figures are staggering and the team advises that these messages represent nearly 42% of all phishing messages. The hardest hit has been PayPal and references to the company has triggered the most dramatic increase in alerts from Kaspersky Lab’s anti-phishing.”
In addition, the labs indicated that the overall share of spam in email traffic increased by 2.2% in July, bringing it to 67%. The USA is the “leading” country of origin for unsolicited email: one sixth (15.3%) of all global spam was sent from this country. Russia keeps its long-standing second position in this ranking with 5.6% of all spam; this, however, is 1.4% less than in June. China remains in third place, supplying 5.3% of global spam.