Kaspersky: Cybercriminals clog Indian business networks with financial phishing
In 2023, Kaspersky anti-phishing technologies detected nearly 75,000 attempts to follow a phishing link on businesses’ devices in India. Interestingly, this number only refers to phishing links related to finance matters – e-commerce, banking, and payment systems.
Phishing persuades users to take action which gives a scammer access to your device, accounts, or personal information. By pretending to be a person or organisation the users trust, they can more easily infect the victim with malware or steal their information.
These social engineering schemes “bait” with trust to get valuable information. This could be anything from a social media login, to your entire identity via your social security number. These schemes may urge the user to open an attachment, follow a link, fill out a form, or reply with personal information.
“Financial phishing” is a type of phishing which refers to fraudulent resources related to banking, payment systems and digital shops. Payment system phishing includes pages impersonating well-known payment brands.
“Phishing attacks are becoming more advanced in their exploitation of social engineering techniques. Financial phishing messages usually take the form of fake notifications from banks, providers, e-pay systems and other organizations. The notification will try to encourage a recipient, for one reason or another, to urgently enter/update their personal data. The scammers usually use the fear technique to convince the users to share their confidential financial and personal data by providing a seemingly important reason. Such messages usually contain threats to block an account if a recipient does not fulfill the requirements therein. For instance, “if you do not provide your personal data by the end of the week, your account will be blocked.” These kinds of messages generally push the recipients to act and should be considered as a red flag before taking any action,” explains Jaydeep Singh, General Manager for South Asia at Kaspersky.
From January to December last year, Kaspersky solutions detected and blocked a total of 74,994 financial phishing attempts targeting companies of various sizes within India. The statistics reflect clicks on phishing links placed in various communication channels, including emails, fraudulent web sites, messengers, social media, etc.
“With the rise of generative AI, it becomes easier for cybercriminals to create more convincing phishing messages, making financial phishing more prevalent. Threat groups also use these tactics to deceive employees and then crack into the corporate networks. Our recent study even showed 1 in 4 (24%) cyber-incidents against businesses in India were due to employees intentionally violating security protocol. Tools to help safeguard against human error are a vital step forward, but they can’t exclude employee education, skills development, and overall strengthening of the company’s ability to detect and respond to cyberattacks,” he adds.
To help companies protect their systems against the damages of a successful phishing attack, Kaspersky experts recommend:
To advance decision-makers’ understanding of the importance of cybersecurity and how best to distribute budgets to stay ahead of threats, engage them with Kaspersky Interactive Protection Simulation for enhanced C-level professional education.
Consider experts’ help. For example, Kaspersky Assessments family of professional services identifies security gaps in your system’s configuration, and the Security Architecture Design helps create an IT security infrastructure that’s a perfect fit for a particular company. Every step of implementation is grounded in real security needs, giving decision-makers convincing arguments to allocate budgets.
Install and use enterprise security solutions with anti-phishing software: The Advanced Anomaly Control feature within Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business Advanced, Kaspersky Total Security for Business and Kaspersky Endpoint Detection and Response Optimum help prevent potentially dangerous activities that are ‘out of the norm’, both undertaken by the user and initiated by the attacker who has already seized control of the system.
