Phishing attempts have increased by 30 million in Q3 of 2018 compared with the same period in 2017, according to Kaspersky Lab.

The antivirus vendor’s latest phishing and spam report revealed that its products had blocked 137 million redirects to phishing sites in the period, a 28% increase on the previous quarter.

Global internet portals (32%) and banks (18%) were the most targeted businesses business. Hackers are often taking advantage of pop-up notifications that some browsers employ, Kaspersky Labs noted.

Partner networks

A Kaspersky Lab spokesperson said: “It is mainly deployed by websites that collaborate with various partner networks. With the aid of pop-up notifications, users are lured onto ‘partner’ sites, where they are prompted to enter, for example, personal data. The owners of the resource receive a reward for every user they process.

“By default, Chrome requests permission to enable notifications for each individual site, and so as to nudge the user into making an affirmative decision, the attackers state that the page cannot continue loading without a little click on the Allow button. The danger is that notifications can appear when the user is visiting a trusted resource.”

Researchers at the cybersecurity firm also found that there was a marked increase in phishing attacks targeting global universities for academic research and student data. The firm recorded attacks against 131 universities in 16 countries worldwide.

In Q3 there was also a spike in sextortion spam, where a malicious email uses some of the victim’s real details, such as name, phone number or password, which have been bought on the dark web. This, Kaspersky Lab said, gives the emailer more credibility to the emailer. They then claim to have webcam images of the victim viewing pornography and demand a Bitcoin payment to avoid them sending the footage to friends and family.

Kaspersky Lab said it had also discovered a campaign using fake news content designed to con people into transferring cryptocurrency to an account controlled by criminals.