Cyber-attacks against the financial industry fell last year as a proportion of all hacking, according to a report from security vendor Kaspersky Lab.
Banking phishing accounted for a mere 16.3% of all attacks throughout 2014, falling by almost 6% on the year previously, while financial phishing fell by 2.7% year-on-year to account for 28.7% of all types of phishing.
Nadezhda Demidova, web content analyst at Kaspersky, said: "The rise in financial phishing that we saw in the past has naturally drawn a response from the brands most frequently abused in phishing scams."
"They are beginning to tackle phishing distribution channels, especially email spam, more actively. That leads to a reduction in the levels of phishing that targets some of the larger brands."
Data from Kaspersky showed that 31% of payment systems data targeted by the crooks last year belonged to Visa customers, with 30% owned by PayPal users and a quarter by American Express customers.
Kaspersky argued that action by international police coalitions, including the shutdown of a botnet spreading the trojan GameOver Zeus last summer, could be making a dent on financial phishing.
Another reason suggested for the fall was a shift from end users to payment systems and their operators, as well as the use of profiling to create minutely targeted attacks.
According to Demidova cybercriminals have responded to countermeasures from police and industry cybercriminals by moving on to new markets.
"For example, in 2014 we saw a large number of phishing scams based on websites that sell plane tickets. These are targets that used to be seen fairly infrequently in phishing scams."
The report found Amazon was the most commonly spoofed web brand in phishing attacks, accounting for just under a third of the attacks detected by Kaspersky last year, whilst Apple and eBay accounted for 14% and 10% respectively.
