Australia good for phishing

Kaspersky released their August report on spam, phishing and other threats. One finding is that Australia is leading the way with being targeted by phishing attacks. Other areas covered by the report included malicious email attachments, organisations most targeted by phishing attacks and statistics on phishing for August. All statistics are based on detections from Kaspersky products, so the results may differ from other products.

It used to be that Facebook would lead the charge when it came to being a target for phishing attacks. In August however, Facebook was displaced from the top of the list by Google. Facebook came in at two, while Yahoo was third. According to the report, this is the first time Yahoo has been in the top three of targets for phishing attacks. Yahoo took the place occupied by Windows Live.

Spam email was measured at 67.2% in August. The country that was detected as having the most spam originate from it was the USA, with 15.9% of all spam email originating from the USA. Second place was Russia with 6%, and China finished in third with 4.7%. In terms of malicious email attachments targeting users, the United Kingdom ranked number one at 13.16%. Second place was Germany at 9.58% and third was the USA with 7.69%.

And of course there is the phishing, where Australia had the distinction of the highest percentage of attacked users. In August, 24.4% of attacked users were located in Australia. Brazil was in second place with 19.5%, while the United Kingdom ran in third with 15.2% of phishing attacks. Again, note that these statistics are derived from whether the Kaspersky anti-phishing component was activated, not whether the phish actually succeeded.

One interesting statistic was that the number of phishing detections was considerably higher (at 32 million) in August when compared to July. The increase was around 62%.

The prevalence of spam and other email borne threats remains a concern for business and personal users alike. As the report from Kaspersky shows, the threat is not going away.

Scott Reeves
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