Facebook tops attackers’ list for cyber frauds

Facebook was leveraged with 4.5 million phishing attempts between April and September this year, as per Kaspersky’s analysis.

Facebook tops attackers’ list for cyber frauds.

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Facebook has been at the top of the list of cybercriminals for launching a cyberattack to steal personal information, according to a report by cybersecurity firm Kaspersky.

Facebook was leveraged with 4.5 million phishing attempts between April and September this year, as per Kaspersky’s analysis. It was followed by Whatsapp and Amazon with 3.7 million and 3.3 million respectively.

While Google’s offering including YouTube, Gmail and Google Drive held sixth position with 1.5 million phishing attempts.

“These results only confirm the trend that popular applications have become valuable platforms for fraudsters’ malicious attacks,” Kaspersky said in a report.

Web services that employees of small and medium businesses most frequently access while working are some of the most exploited by malefactors as they are used as a springboard for phishing, it added.

The statistics also points out at what web applications are likely to be limited on organisations’ corporate devices. As noted by Kaspersky, the top five most blocked applications only include social networks- Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and LinkedIn.

While the organisations bar Facebook, they don’t include messengers, file sharing or mail services in their list of applications that cannot be used by employees due to their work purpose needs.