Brits are the world’s biggest targets for phishing scams
Are the British the most gullible people in the world? Probably not, but the scammers and spammers out there clearly think that they are.
Security research company Proofpoint found that web users in the UK are almost three times more likely to receive phishing mail than those in the US, Germany and France.
And while the Brits were being sent more malicious links to trojans and exploit kits, Germans were hit with the greatest amount of unsolicited spam for penis enlargers and the like.
The scams endeavour to extract money from UK web users through banking trojans and phishing emails mimicking organisations such as the Royal Bank of Scotland.
“The malicious emails can deliver payloads ranging from credential phish to banking trojans, and can depend on exploit kits or end-user interaction – such as clicking a link to download a file and a malicious attachment – in order to execute,” Proofpoint said in a blogpost.
“On average, an unsolicited email sitting in the inbox of a user in the UK is more than five times more likely to contain a malicious URL than for a user in Germany.”
