The number of financial phishing attacks is expected to rise during the Holiday season which starts unofficially on so-called Black Friday and continues through Cyber Monday and Christmas.
Retrospective research by Kaspersky Lab specialists shows that, over the last few years, the holiday period was marked by an increase in phishing and other types of attacks, which suggests that the pattern will be repeated this year.
A peak season for sales is obviously also a peak hunting season for criminals: retailers offer lots of hard-to-resist deals and people plan on spending money on gifts for themselves, their friends and relatives. So, while e-commerce customers are making wishes for the upcoming sales, the retailers themselves are preparing their stores for a massive rise in the number of visitors, and financial infrastructure owners - banks and payment systems - are getting ready for a huge increase in the number and value of transactions; cybercriminals are preparing too.
At least, that was the case in previous years.
As Kaspersky Lab threat statistics shows, in 2014 and 2015 the proportion of phishing pages that hunt financial data (credit cards details) detected by the company during Q4 (which covers the holiday period) was around 9 percentage points higher than the average for the year. In particular, the result for financial phishing in all of 2014 was 28.73%, while the result for Q4 was 38.49%. In 2015, 34.33% of all phishing attacks was financial phishing, while in Q4, that type of phishing was responsible for 43.38% of all attacks.
Holidays influence the type of financial targets that criminals are after. Both in 2014 and 2015 Kaspersky Lab researchers witnessed a significant (several percentage points) increase in phishing attacks against payment systems and online stores. Attacks against banks also grew, but at a lower rate.Read more
