ThreatMark media research covering more than 400 press articles across all European countries has revealed that Phishing is the most mentioned and discussed ahead of other fraudulent cyberattacks such as financial malware and Remote Administration tool abuse.
We are going to bring you a summary of that media research, followed by our expert opinion – what you read is like looking at the top of an iceberg, but the main part of an iceberg lies below the waterline.
The summary of research follows.
Ever more often people all over the world use Digital and on-line payments. That’s why we are not surprised that the number of attacks has risen more and more. In the year 2015 a higher number of attacks were reported by the media than in the year 2016. People can read about these attacks in the media and in journals all over the world. But it is necessary to say that if journals don’t write about these problems, it doesn’t mean there are no attacks. While conducting the research we were able to identify countries where journalists write about attacks the most and countries where journalists write about them less. A great deal of information can be found in journals in Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Northern European countries. Sweden’s media for instance often writes about attacks. Countries where less information can be found are generally located in Eastern Europe, for example: Bulgaria, Serbia, Lithuania and Hungary.
The main media presence still belongs to phishing. In Europe we can see many forms of phishing. The classic form is reception of an e-mail pretending to come from a from bank (it doesn’t have to be your bank. This e-mail usually contains a request for update of personal information or authentication of equipment and links to a phishing website. In the last two years people have also received e-mails from state enterprises or institutions. For example in Ireland it is common to receive e-mails about paying /repaying taxes. It has happened in Norway, Greece, Spain and the Netherlands too. There have been occurrences, where important messages from police and postal services were used as bait. Recently in Benelux, Sweden and Denmark fake SMS have appeared instead of e-mails.
We believe in having more comprehensive insight into what’s happening and this can be seen in our next research activity. READ HERE more about the state of cybercriminal market maturity.
