Over a one-year period, 64% of the users in South Africa who responded to a survey by Kaspersky Lab and B2B International faced online threats involving attempted money theft.
However, non-financial cyber-attacks can result in unforeseen expenses as well.
Cybercriminals obtain valuable user data through a variety of methods. The quickest way of digging into users’ wallets is to gain access to their accounts for payment systems, online banking or online shops that store bank card data. There are numerous techniques to collect this information, including phishing pages, which imitate the official Web sites of the relevant institutions, malware that collects logins and passwords as users enter them on their devices, and many more.
According to the survey, 64% of users locally faced financial cyber-attacks during 2014, with 10% of respondents reportedly losing money as a result.
When explaining how they lost the money, 14% of respondents in South Africa stated that hackers had stolen their money by gaining access to their payment services accounts, 20% believed they had fallen for fraudsters’ tricks and entered their credentials on a fake Web site and 8% were sure that their logins and passwords had been intercepted by malware.
The average amount stolen from each user was $190, but one victim in five lost over $1 000 to this type of online fraud.
During the year, many users’ online accounts – e-mail, social networking and so on – were hacked.
This was reported by 19% of respondents. In addition to being used by cybercriminals to send spam and malicious URLs, compromised accounts can be a source of financial losses. Information that can be found in a user’s mailbox often includes account credentials sent by payment services and online stores in response to registration and password recovery requests.
In addition, 48% of respondents reported a malware-related incident within the past year, with one incident in five resulting in financial losses. The average damage caused by malware amounted to $130 including, among other costs, expenses associated with mitigating the consequences of infection, getting help from IT experts and purchasing specialised software.
“Some users regard cyber-threats as some sort of remote entities that can only do damage in cyberspace. However, many online threats have clear implications for our lives in the real world – be it lost data or stolen money. Rather than paying for the consequences, it makes much more sense to take care of your security beforehand,” says Elena Kharchenko, head of Consumer Product Management, Kaspersky Lab.
