+Southeast Asia continues to have a very high number of phishing attacks (SEA). The latest data from the global cybersecurity company Kaspersky showed that it only took. Cybercriminals six months to attack more users from the region than last year.
Between January and June 2022, Kaspersky’s Anti-Phishing system stopped 12,127,692 wrong links in SEA. It is 1 million more than the total number of phishing attacks in 2021, 11,260,643.
Phishing, a type of social engineering attack, is still one of the main ways that attackers. Get into the systems of their targets. Whether they are people or businesses. It works the same way it does when cybercriminals send many emails pretending. To be actual companies or people to promote fake websites or infect users with malicious attachments.
The end goal of a phishing attack is to steal credentials, primarily financial and login information. To steal money or, worse, to compromise an entire organization..
More than half of the phishing attacks that Kaspersky found in H1 2022 were aimed at users in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam.
Four of the six SEA countries—Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam—had more. Phishing emails in the first half of this year than they did in 2021.
A top researcher at Kaspersky recently sounded the alarm that most Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups in the Asia-Pacific region, including SEA, use targeted phishing to get into a well-protected network. This means that people can lose money as a result of this.
As the word “advanced” suggests, an APT uses continuous, stealthy, and sophisticated hacking techniques to get into a system and stay there for a long time, which could cause damage.
APTs are usually used against high-value targets, like nation-states and large corporations, because they require a lot of work. The goal of an APT is to steal information over a long period rather than just “dipping in” and leaving quickly. As many black hat hackers do in lower-level cyber-attacks.
Spear phishing attacks are often brutal to stop with traditional security because they are so well thought out. Because of this, it’s getting harder to find them. One mistake by an employee can cause significant problems for businesses, governments, and even non-profits.
To stop spear phishing scams, employees need to know about the dangers. Like the chance of getting fake emails in their inboxes. Along with education, we need technology that focuses on email security. Kaspersky suggests putting anti-phishing software on mail servers and computers where employees work.
Kaspersky recommends that businesses and organizations build incident response capabilities to help them handle an attack’s aftermath. They should also use threat intelligence services to learn more about how the threats. And tactics of active APT groups are changing over time.
