Financial phishing is on the decline, reveals Kaspersky report

There is more good news in cybersecurity: the volume of phishing against financial targets is declining (at least in 2020) according to the Kaspersky survey published today: in 2020, the company’s anti-phishing technologies detected 434,898,635 attempts to visit various types of phishing pages, of which 37.2% were associated with financial phishing. The number is 14.2% lower than the total registered in 2019 (when these pages represented 51.4% to total). It was the lowest percentage of financial phishing in the past five years.

The main conclusions of the survey were as follows:

• In 2020, the percentage of users affected by phishing decreased slightly, from 15.7% to 13.21%.
• E-commerce has become the preferred target for phishing attacks: in almost 20% of attempts to visit phishing pages, the pages were disguised as e-commerce stores.
• Phishing attacks against PayPal users increased from 26.8% in 2019 to 38.7% in 2020. The long-standing leader in the category, which was the Visa banner, fell to fourth place, with 10.2% of phishing attacks.

Regarding PCs and notebooks, the conclusions were as follows:

• In 2020, 625,364 users were attacked by bank Trojans – 148,579 less than the 773,943 of 2019.
• In 2020, users in Russia, Germany and Kazakhstan were the most frequent targets for financial malware.
• Zbot is still the most widespread banking malware (22.2% of attacked users), while second place is now held by CliptoShuffler (15.3%), with Emotet (14.5%) in third place.
• 36% of users affected by banking malware are corporate – an increase of one percentage point over the previous year.

Regarding mobile devices:

• In 2020, the number of users attacked by malware for Android banking fell by more than 55%: from 675,772 in 2019 to 294,158 in 2020.
• Japan, Taiwan and Spain ended up with the highest percentage of users affected by banking malware for Android.

With information from the press office