India joins Asia’s top 5 phishers league
McAfee Labs says India has 1,557 servers hosting suspected sites
By : DC Correspondent
Update: 2014-09-05 04:19 GMT
Mumbai: India is the 4th most affected country by phishing cyber criminals in Asia, with 786 phishing domains, while the United States remains the top most country with the most amount of phishing domains according to “McAfee Labs Threats Report: August 2014”. While India is home to 1,557 servers hosting suspect Phishing Urals, the US hosts 44 per cent of the servers hosting Phishing Urals and 42 per cent of the servers hosting Spam Urals.
According to the McAfee report which quoted an unnamed source, phishing is so rampant that one enterprising cyber thief has even done the heavy lifting for other cyber criminals by extracting data from still-vulnerable sites and selling the stolen data on the black market. The report says that currently more than 300,000 websites remain unpatched and vulnerable to this type of criminal activity.
The report says that they had been testing business users’ ability to detect phishing through a quiz and found that 80 per cent of all test takers have fallen for at least one in seven phishing emails. “Further, we see that accounting and finance, and human resource which arguably hold some of the most sensitive corporate data—perform the worst at detecting scams, falling behind by a margin of 4 per cent to 9 per cent,” said Vincent Weafer, senior vice -president for McAfee Labs says.
Commenting on the trust chain being broken and the infrastructure has not kept pace with changing times, Mr Weafer informed, “Every aspect of the trust chain has been broken in the last few years from passwords to OpenSSL public key encryption and most recently USB security. The infrastructure that we so heavily rely on depends on technology that hasn’t kept pace with change and no longer meets today’s demands.”