Phishing or spear phishing has been around for many years but, unlike many other cyber attacks, they aren’t overly sophisticated. The idea is to get someone in a company or a group of people to click on a bogus link in an attempt to acquire sensitive information or access to systems.
The method is being increasingly used around the world. Nearly 100,000 people reported receiving phishing emails in 2015 in the UK alone, which equates to nearly 8,000 a day.
Here are some of the biggest phishing attacks so far:
5. The UK’s biggest phishing scam
The Met Police’s Action Fraud unit estimated that £59m worth of fraud was prevented in the UK after three men were convicted of launching sophisticated phishing scams to access the accounts of bank customers in 14 countries.
About 2,600 phishing pages that mimicked banking websites were analysed by the Met Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU), the Serious Organised Crime Agency and the US Secret Service.
The men behind the scam were traced to the UK, where they stayed in plush hotels in London while continuing to scam victims.
They were eventually caught using laptops to log-in to servers storing compromised banking data.
Officers later discovered servers containing details of 30,000 bank customers, 12,500 of which were in the UK, and 70 million customer email addresses to be used in phishing scams.
The men were jailed for a total of 20 years. Investigating officer DI Jason Tunn said at the time that it was the “biggest case the PCeU has dealt with to date and is likely to be the biggest cyber phishing case so far in the UK”.
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