Nigeria’s Internet Phishing Trails South Africa, Kenya in 2022

A Kaspersky report reveals that 7% of individuals and corporate users in Nigeria encountered phishing attacks on their devices, which were detected and stopped.

Experts at Kaspersky revealed that throughout 2022, cybercriminals increasingly turned to phish scams. In South Africa, the share of users affected by phishing attacks stood at 9.7% while Kenya accounted for 8.4%.

The company’s anti-phishing system successfully blocked 507,851,735 attempts to access global content fraudulently in 2022, twice the number of attacks thwarted in 2021.

In the second quarter (Q2) of 2022, Kaspersky analysis revealed that attacks related to data loss threats (phishing and scams/social engineering) increased significantly in Africa, compared with the previous quarter, with the company’s security solutions detecting 10,722,886 phishing attacks in Africa in Q2.

The sphere most frequently targeted with phishing attacks was delivery services. Fraudsters send fake emails pretending to be from well-known delivery companies and claim there is a delivery issue. The email includes a link to a fake website, which requests personal information or financial details. If the victim falls for the scam, they could lose their identity and banking information, which may be sold to websites on the dark web.

The report revealed that financial phishing was the most commonly targeted category, with online stores and online financial services being the affected businesses. Among the financial phishing attempts in Nigeria, 31.1 percent were through websites of fake payment systems, 51.2 percent through fake online stores, and 17.8 percent through fake online bank portals.

Investors King understands that Phishing is one of the most prevalent threats in the cybersecurity space, which is often the gateway to many of the worst cyber threats. It is one of the oldest and most flexible types of social engineering attacks and could be used for different purposes, to lure unwary users to sites and trick them into entering personal information, which often results in financial loss, identity theft, and also reputational damage for both individuals and businesses.

To avoid falling prey to phishing scams, internet users are advised to open only emails and clicks when they trust the sender and are also advised to be vigilant and observant to check the spelling of a website’s URL if it has been spelled incorrectly.