Around 3,000 UK internet users were subjected to phishing attacks each day during 2012-2013, according to a report from anti-virus vendor Kaspersky.
The company said this figure has increased substantially since last year when UK users were hit with around 1,000 attacks per day.
Across the world, phishers launched attacks on an average of 102,100 people each day in 2013, twice as many as the previous year.
The most attacked countries were Russia, at 18.7 per cent, the US at 12.2 per cent, India at 9.9 per cent, and Germany at 6.2 per cent. The UK and France tied in fifth place.
Phishing attacks via malicious links in emails are becoming less popular with 12 per cent of all registered phishing attacks worldwide launched via spam emails. The other 88 per cent came from links to phishing web pages, via Skype and other IMs or from social networking sites.
“For a long time, phishing was regarded as a variation of typical spam emails,” the firm said in the report. “However, the data from this report confirms that the scale of phishing attacks has reached such a significant level that they should be regarded as a dangerous threat category of their own, not merely an offshoot of general spam.”
The report found that Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Amazon are top targets of malicious users. Online game services, payment systems, and the websites of banks and other credit and financial organisations are also popular targets.
Nikita Shvetsov, deputy research chief technology officer at Kaspersky Lab, said the volume and variety of phishing attacks detected during the analysis indicates that phishing is not merely one tool among many for the illegal enrichment of fraudsters, but represents a significant and visible threat.
“These attacks are relatively simple to organise and are demonstrably effective, attracting an increasing number of cybercriminals to this type of illegal activity. The volume of phishing attacks, which according to Kaspersky Security Network nearly doubled in a single year, confirms this trend,” he said.