DIGITAL LIFE

Banking Trojans increasingly affect smartphones. Cryptocurrency phishing increases by 83.4%

A new report from Kaspersky reveals that the number of users targeted by mobile banking Trojans has increased by 3.6 times, growing from 69,200 in 2023 to 247,949 in 2024. Malicious activity increased significantly in the second half of last year.

With the increase in digital financial transactions, cybercriminals’ focus has shifted to mobile devices and cryptocurrency assets, Kaspersky experts point out. In 2024, detections of cryptocurrency-related phishing increased by 83.4%. The cybersecurity company’s technologies prevented 10,706,340 cryptocurrency-related phishing attempts.

Last year, attackers continued to lure users to phishing pages and scams that imitated the websites of popular brands and financial organizations. Bank impersonation schemes were the most popular “trap,” accounting for 42.6% of financial phishing attempts.

Amazon Online Shopping was impersonated by 33.2% of all phishing pages and scams targeting online store users in 2024, making it the most popular brand for cybercriminals.

The volume of attacks related to Apple fell by almost 3 percentage points compared to last year, falling to 15.7%, and scams involving Netflix slowed slightly to 16%. On the other hand, interest in the Chinese marketplace Alibaba increased, rising from 3.2% in 2023 to 8% in 2024.

Payment systems were impersonated in 19.3% of financial phishing attacks detected and blocked by Kaspersky last year. In this ecosystem, PayPal was the most targeted brand, although the volume of attacks fell from 54.7% to 37.5%.

Attacks targeting Mastercard almost doubled, rising from 16.6% in 2023 to 30.5% in 2024. American Express and Cielo also entered the Top 5 of these attacks.

Financial malware for PCs decreases...Despite the increase in the number of users who encountered mobile banking malware, the number of people affected by financial malware for PCs decreased from 312,453 in 2023 to 199,204 in 2024. Currently, most of the financial malware for PCs that Kaspersky detects does not target online banking services, but rather cryptocurrencies.

The most frequently detected banking Trojans include ClipBanker (62.9%), Grandoreiro (17.1%), CliptoShuffler (9.5%) and BitStealer (1.3%). Grandoreiro targeted 1,700 banks and 276 cryptocurrency wallets in 45 countries and territories worldwide last year.

The top 20 countries most affected by PC financial malware include Turkmenistan (8.8%), Tajikistan (6.2%), Kazakhstan (2.5%), Switzerland (2.3%), Kyrgyzstan (2.2%), Mexico (1.6%), Argentina (1.1%), Paraguay (1.1%) and Uruguay (1%).

In the world of mobile malware, the most common banking Trojans were those from the Mamont “family” (36.7%), whose distribution schemes range from simple scams to complex social engineering schemes, with fake stores and delivery apps.

Turkey continued to be the country most affected by mobile banking malware (5.7%), followed by Indonesia (2.7%), India (2.4%), Azerbaijan (0.9%), Uzbekistan (0.6%) and Malaysia (0.3%).

mundophone