PHISHING incidents continue to skyrocket in Southeast Asia (SEA), the latest data from global cybersecurity Kaspersky showed.
Kaspersky revealed that it only took six months for cybercriminals to exceed their phishing attacks last year against users from the region.
From January to June 2022, Kaspersky’s Anti-Phishing system blocked a total of 12,127,692 malicious links in SEA. It is one million more than the total number of phishing attacks detected in 2021 at 11,260,643.
Phishing, a type of social engineering attack, remains one of the key methods used by attackers to compromise their targets — both individuals and organizations. It works as it is done on a large scale where cybercriminals send massive waves of emails purporting to be legitimate companies or personalities to promote fake pages or infect users with malicious attachments.
The end goal of a phishing attack is to steal credentials — particularly financial and login information — to steal money or worse to compromise an entire organization.
Moreover, Kaspersky noted that more than half of the first half of 2022 phishing detections were targeting Kaspersky users in Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam.
Four out of six countries from SEA — Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam — recorded more phishing emails during the first six months of this year compared to their total number of incidents in 2021.
“The first half of 2022 is eventful in good and bad ways. On a personal level, we went through the seismic shift of trying to regain our lives post-pandemic, forcing companies and organizations to welcome remote and hybrid work. The travel sector, including airlines, airports, travel agencies, and more, has also been overwhelmed by the influx of tourists wanting to travel with borders now open. Behind these shifts are networks and systems that needed to be updated and secured hastily. On the other hand, cybercriminals are all ears with their ability to tweak their messages and infuse them with believable urgency. As a result, we’ve seen real, unfortunate incidents of victims losing money because of phishing attacks,” said Yeo Siang Tiong, general manager for Southeast Asia at Kaspersky.
Targeted phishing
Aside from the individual loss of money, Kaspersky also sounded the alarm that most of the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups in the Asia Pacific including SEA use targeted phishing to enter into a highly defended network.
Yeo said the majority or 75 percent of executives are aware and even anticipate an APT attack against their organizations. He said, “backup security plans – like incident response capabilities – should be in place to stop a phishing email from becoming the launch pad of a damaging attack to organizations.”
Kaspersky noted that traditional security often doesn’t stop spear phishing attacks because they are so cleverly customized. As a result, they’re becoming more difficult to detect. It said one employee mistake can have serious consequences for businesses, governments, and even nonprofit organizations.
With stolen data, fraudsters can reveal commercially sensitive information, manipulate stock prices or commit various acts of espionage. In addition, spear phishing attacks can deploy malware to hijack computers, organizing them into enormous networks called botnets that can be used for denial-of-service attacks.
To fight spear phishing scams, the cybersecurity firm said employees need to be aware of the threats, such as the possibility of bogus emails landing in their inboxes. Besides education, technology that focuses on email security is necessary. Kaspersky recommends installing protective anti-phishing solutions on mail servers as well as on employee workstations.
For enterprises and organizations, Kaspersky suggests building incident response capabilities that will help manage the aftermath of an attack and to incorporate threat intelligence services to have in-depth knowledge of the evolving threat and tactics of active APT groups.