Kaspersky: 120 Million Phishing Attacks Worldwide in Q1, Israelis Targeted Twice as Much as 2019

A new report by cybersecurity company Kaspersky reveals the massive magnitude of phishing attacks across the world. According to the report, Kaspersky's anti-phishing software prevented 119,115,577 attempts to fraudulently obtain personal information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details from online users during the first quarter of 2020. A total of 8.8% of all Kaspersky users were targeted.

In Israel, 561,366 phishing attacks were thwarted in the first quarter of the year, more than double compared to the first three months of 2019 (269,635).

There also seems to be no end in sight to the prevalence of spam, with Kaspersky reporting that 45.24% of all email transactions in Israel in 2019 were spam, a slightly better figure than the rest of the world in which spam accounts for just over 50% of all email.

Kaspersky's report found that France, Greece and Portugal were the targets of more than a third of all phishing attempts (36.27%). Online retail was the main sector to be attacked (18.12%), with international content websites not far behind (16.44%). Social networks (13.07%) and digital banking (10.95%) were also popular victims. According to Kaspersky, the targets selected by the hackers are a testament to their awareness of the way people are spending their time online during the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic: Consuming more news, buying online rather than in shops, connecting remotely to banking services and using social networks due to social distancing.

The Kaspersky Fraud Prevention system also discovered that one in every 50 online transactions during 2019 was fraud. 63% of those fraud cases were attempts to get access to account details and usernames via malicious applications and remote control apps. The remote control apps through which these attempts were made include: AnyDesk, TeamViewer, AirDroid and AhMyth.