Phishing attacks increase by 87 percent: Kaspersky Lab report

ndia is among the top countries to be hit by phishing attacks, according to a recent study published by Kaspersky Lab. Phishing is an online scamming technique where people are tricked in giving up their personal information. Such attacks have grown by 87 percent over the past year globally, according to Kasperky Lab.

Phishing is a kind of internet fraud where cyber criminals create fake web pages of popular web sites to get personal information from users. The sites are usually related to popular websites like banking, email service, or can be any popular networking site. Most of the emails sent are from established websites like Yahoo, Facebook or Google.

"In 2012-2013, 102,100 users around the world were subjected to phishing attacks on a daily basis. In Russia, 19,000 users were attacked each day, 12,000 in the US, 10,000 in India, 6,000 in Germany, 3,000 in France, and another 3,000 in the UK," the Kaspersky Lab report stated. The report further reads that in 2012-2013, roughly 37.3 million users were subjected to phishing attacks globally, up 87 percent from 2011-2012.

"Most often, phishing attacks targeted users in Russia, the US, India, Vietnam and the UK. Phishing attacks were most frequently launched from the US, the UK, Germany, Russia and India," the report highlighted. Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Amazon are top targets of malevolent users. Online game websites, online payment sites, the bank websites and other credit and financial groups are also frequent targets, it added.

The Kaspersky Lab report also highlighted that India, Russia, US, UK, Germany and Russia are the countries most hit by the attacks.