The number of phishing attacks worldwide in the third quarter of 2018 reached more than 137 million, an increase of nearly 30 percent according to security company Kaspersky Lab.
The company said its anti-phishing system prevented 137,382,124 attempts to visit fraudulent Web pages. The amount continues to rise quickly, growing 28 percent from the second quarter of the year.
During the third quarter, the financial services sector was hit especially hard, with more than one third of all the phishing attacks aimed at banks, payment systems, and e-commerce organizations, the report said.
“We’ve been witnessing a rise in the number of phishing attempts for a while now,” said Nadezhda Demidova, security researcher at Kaspersky Lab. “Many factors influence such growth, like fraudsters’ ability to keep coming up with new schemes and tricks. They also borrow the ideas from foreign ‘colleagues’ to use on local markets as a means of communication, which further helps their technologies develop.”
Kaspersky Lab experts advise users to take measures to protect themselves from phishing. This includes always checking a link address and if the sender’s email is genuine before clicking anything; only using a secure connection, especially when visiting sensitive Web sites; and for maximum protection using virtual private networks (VPN) that encrypt traffic.
