Summary
- Kenya accounted for over one out of every four of the two million online attacks in Africa ahead of Nigeria and Egypt as cybercriminals use Covid-19 information to gain unauthorised access to devices and networks, new data from Kaspersky has revealed.
- In its quarter two report, the cybersecurity firm indicates that Kenya had more than half a million phishing attacks, coming in second to South Africa which has 616,666 spam and phishing attacks.
- Egypt accounted for 492,532 and Nigeria 299,426, while Kenya’s East African neighbours Rwanda and Ethiopia only accounted for 68,931 and 31,585 respectively.
Kenya accounted for over one out of every four of the two
million online attacks in Africa ahead of Nigeria and Egypt as
cybercriminals use Covid-19 information to gain unauthorised access to
devices and networks, new data from Kaspersky has revealed.
In
its quarter two report, the cybersecurity firm indicates that Kenya had
more than half a million phishing attacks, coming in second to South
Africa which has 616,666 spam and phishing attacks.
Egypt
accounted for 492,532 and Nigeria 299,426, while Kenya’s East African
neighbours Rwanda and Ethiopia only accounted for 68,931 and 31,585
respectively.
Phishing is a strong attack method
because it is done in large scale. By sending massive waves of emails
under the name of legitimate institutions or promoting fake pages,
malicious users increase their chances of success in their hunt for
innocent people’s credentials.
“When summarising the
results of the first quarter, we assumed that COVID-19 would be the main
topic for spammers and phishers for the past few months. And it
certainly happened. While there was the rare spam mailing sent out
without mentioning the pandemic, phishers adapted their old schemes to
make them relevant for the current news agenda, as well as come up with
new tricks,” says Tatyana Sidorina, security expert at Kaspersky.
Kaspersky analysis has indicated in Q2, 2020 that phishers
increasingly performed targeted attacks, with most of their focus on
small companies. To attract attention, fraudsters forged emails and
websites from organisations whose products or services could be
purchased by potential victims. In the process of making these fake
assets, fraudsters often did not even try to make the site appear
authentic.
Kenya has been seeing increased cybercrime
activity with the latest data from the Communication Authority of Kenya
showing that in the most recent quarter 34,644,531cyber threats were
detected.
Further, 17,844 advisories were issued by the
National KE-CIRT which was an increase from the 16,654 issued in the
previous quarter.
Working from home and increased flow of information during the pandemic has opened more avenues for cybercriminals.
According
to Kaspersky, Phishing is one of the oldest and most flexible types of
social engineering attacks. They are used in many ways, and for
comprising financial credentials such as bank account passwords or
payment card details, or login details for social media accounts. In the
wrong hands, this opens doors to various malicious operations, such as
money being stolen or corporate networks being compromised. This makes
phishing a popular initial infection method.
Kaspersky experts advise users to take the measures to protect themselves from phishing.
These
precautions include always checking online addresses in unknown or
unexpected messages, whether it is the web address of the site where you
are being directed, the link address in a message and even the sender’s
email address, to make sure they are genuine and that the link in the
message doesn’t hide another hyperlink.
If you are not
sure that the website is genuine and secure, never enter your
credentials. If you think that you may have entered your login and
password on a fake page, immediately change your password and call your
bank or other payment provider if you think your card details were
compromised.
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