Number of Internet users facing phishing attacks has increased by 87% to 37.3 million from 19.9 million in the last 12 months, according to a report from the Kaspersky Lab.
According to the report Facebook, Yahoo, Google and Amazon are some of the main targets of cybercriminals and the analysts said that phishing attacks are becoming huge cyber threats.
Kaspersky Lab Deputy CTO, Nikita Shvetsov, said that the volume and variety of phishing attacks detected during the survey indicates that phishing is not merely one tool among many for the illegal enrichment of fraudsters, but represents a significant and visible threat.
"The volume of phishing attacks, which according to Kaspersky Security Network nearly doubled in a single year, confirms this trend," Shvetsov said.
About 12% of all phishing attacks were launched through spam mailings, while the remaining 88% were orchestrated through links to phishing pages followed by users through a web browser, a messaging system or otherwise interacting with the computer.
The survey reveals that the phishing attacks have double to 102,100 each day in 2012-2013 compared to the average number of daily attacks during 2011-2012.
Regionally, the most attacked users are from countries like Russia, the US, India, Vietnam and the UK, while users from Vietnam, the US, India and Germany have the greatest number of attacked users where the number of attacked users doubled since last year.
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Countries with majority of the servers hosting phishing pages were registered in the US, the UK, Germany, Russia and India and the number of unique attack sources like the fraudulent websites and servers has tripled from 2012-2013.
About 30% of all the registered attacks were made on the services of Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Amazon, while over 20% of all phishing attacks mimicked banks and other financial organisations.
