RSA Study: Targeted attacks against banks continue to soar

The study saw the fourth-highest volume of targeted attacks against banks and credit unions in the past year.

In total 195 organisations were targeted worldwide in the cyber attacks last month, including 30 institutions that had never been attacked in this way before.

The research also shows that China has jumped up the rankings of countries hosting phishing attacks, finishing in third place with 12 per cent. According to RSA this can be attributed to the Rock Phish gang, believed to be based in Russia and registering ISP domains in the Asian country.

The figures also indicate that the UK hosted a similar proportion of the global online attacks in August as in July, with three per cent respectively. But the number of cyber strikes hosted in the US dwarfs these figures. Just under half (47 per cent) of all the global attacks were hosted in America.

“This month’s results tend to indicate two distinct trends,” says Andrew Moloney, director of financial services EMEA at RSA. “Firstly, a migration of attacks to smaller, perhaps less well protected entities, and secondly hosting attacks in locations where the shutting down of fraudulent sites may be more protracted, due to language barriers and a lack of strong regulatory frameworks.”

He added: “These trends are consistent with our expectation that as large banks and other big targets improve their layers of defence to such attacks; the fraudsters simply move to lower hanging fruit.”

RSA is the security division of the data management and network storage firm EMC.

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