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29 March 2024

Phishing Attacks: UAE a key regional target

Published
By Staff

The UAE was at the forefront of phishing attacks among the Middle East and Africa countries last year with one-third of attempts aimed at stealing money, according to the latest data.

Data collected for Kaspersky Lab’s study ‘Financial cyber threats in 2013’, revealed  around 38.38 phishing attacks were targeted at UAE followed by Saudi Arabia (29.31 per cent), Egypt (10.16 per cent), Qatar (9.64 per cent), Kuwait (6.29 per cent) and Oman (6.21 per cent) among the regional countries.

About one-third of all phishing attacks were aimed at stealing money, it said, adding that just less than one per cent of all global phishing attacks were targeted at Middle East countries.

Antivirus and internet security software provider said 31 per cent of targets in the Middle East and Africa last year were social networking websites at 31 per cent, closely followed by internet portal e-mails at 30 per cent, banks (12 per cent), blogs (8 per cent), e-shop (7 per cent), games (3 per cent) and others.

Fraudsters use the brand names of major companies with large client databases in search of a big criminal profit.  For example, about 60 per cent of all phishing attacks using fake bank pages exploited the names of just 25 organisations.

Among e-payment systems the phishers’ ‘favourites’ are even more clearly-defined: 88.3 per cent of phishing attacks in this category involved one of four international brands: PayPal, American Express, Master Card and Visa.

Sergey Lozhkin, Senior Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab, said: “Phishing attacks are so popular because they are simple to deploy and extremely effective. It is often not easy for even advanced internet users to distinguish a well-designed fraudulent site from a legitimate page, which makes it even more important to instal a specialized protection solution. In addition, phishing causes reputational and financial damage to organisations that see their brands exploited in phishing attacks.”

Phishers don’t just imitate the websites of financial institutions – they also frequently attack via social networking sites. In 2013, the number of attacks using fake pages of Facebook and other social networking sites grew by 6.8 percentage points and accounted for 35.4 per cent of the total, said Kaspersky.