Due to their popularity, messenger apps such as WhatsApp continue to be a popular tool for phishing scammers, according to a recent analysis by Kaspersky. According to this, 2020 malicious links in connection with messengers were blocked worldwide between December 2021 and May 94.559.
That corresponds to more than 500 incidents per day. Of this, WhatsApp accounted for 89,6 percent, Telegram 5,6 percent, Viper 4,7 percent and Hangouts less than 0,1 percent. In Germany, 96 percent of phishing attempts took place via WhatsApp.
Dangerous links via WhatsApp
Messenger apps such as WhatsApp or Telegram are popular and used by many users - including in the SME sector. Currently 2,7 billion people worldwide use such messenger apps, by the year 2023 there will be 3,1 billion - almost 40 percent of the global population. As a result, cyber criminals misuse them to phishing users' data - the sad top spot here is WhatApp. The high percentage of phishing links on WhatsApp and Telegram can be traced back to their global distribution. WhatsApp in particular is very popular around the world. Viper, on the other hand, has a regional focus in Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, while Hangouts is particularly common in the USA and France.
The Kaspersky research shows that currently only 3 percent of all phishing links discovered are from German messenger users. Nevertheless, Germany already ranks fifth in the ranking of all countries. However, users in Russia (46 percent), Brazil (16 percent) and India (7 percent) are significantly more affected.
Germany already in 5th place
Although only 4 percent of all phishing links tracked down in Germany were found in Telegram messages and the rest of them were on WhatsApp (an average of 124 phishing attempts per WhatsApp user), every Telegram user still sees himself affected by 53 phishing attempts .
"Statistically, instant messengers are still one of the tools most popular with scammers," said Tatyana Shcherbakova, senior web content analyst at Kaspersky. “But this is only partly due to the high popularity of these apps among users. Another reason is the possibility of being able to carry out attacks via the functionalities built into the apps. A phishing attempt is often difficult to recognize because the associated link differs from the original in just one letter or just a small typo. Increased vigilance on the part of users in combination with anti-phishing technologies offer reliable protection in the fight against phishing in messenger apps.”
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