Facebook gets more phishing e-mails than Google, IRS

Facebook, the world’s most popular social networking site, ranked fourth in the top 10 most popular phishing targets on the web in the first quarter, secure content management solutions developer Kaspersky Lab said in its latest report. It topped even Google, the Internal Revenue Service and RapidShare ─ some of the most popular sites where many users receive fraudulent e-mails seeking financial information, according to Kasperky Lab. "Facebook popped up unexpectedly in fourth place. This was the first time since we started monitoring that attacks on a social networking site have been so prolific," according to experts Darya Gudkova, Elena Bondarenko and Maria Namestnikova who compiled Kaspersky Lab’s Spam Evolution Report. Facebook accounted for 5.7 percent of the phishing pie. It is more targeted than top search engine Google, which ranked 5th with 3.1 percent attacks, followed by the IRS with 2.2 percent, and one of the world’s largest file-hosting sites, RapidShare, with 1.8 percent More than half of the phishing pie was taken by e-commerce payment site PayPal with 52.2 percent, followed by online auction and shopping site eBay with 13.3 percent, and banking institution HSBC with 7.8 percent. Meanwhile, the report said that in the first quarter the percentage of phishing emails averaged 0.57 percent of the total volume of spam e-mail traffic, which averaged 85.2 percent. Asia remained the leading source of spam among continents with 31.7 percent, followed closely by Europe with 30.6 percent of spam being distributed from its territory. By country, the US kept the lead with 16 percent followed by India with 7 percent, and Russia with 6 percent. Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites with more than 400 million users globally. Fraudsters usually use stolen users’ accounts to distribute spam, or bulk emails to account owners and their friends in the network. In the case of Facebook and other social networking sites, fraudsters take advantage of the sites' options like sending requests, links to photos and invitations, with advertisements attached. Also, while registering accounts, users enter their data ─ like an e-mail address ─ which the spammers add to their databases. ─VS, GMANews.TV