Internet and search giant, Google has published a new report which finds that South Africa is among the worst countries in the world for manual hijacking online.<\/p>\n
According to Google<\/a>, manual hijacking occurs when professional attackers spend considerable time exploiting a single victim\u2019s account, often causing financial losses.<\/p>\n And despite their rarity – 9 incidents per million users per day\u2014they\u2019re often severe, Google said.<\/p>\n “Of the hijacking case samples we analyzed, we found that most of the hijackers appear to originate from five main countries: China, Ivory Coast, Malaysia, Nigeria, and South Africa.”<\/p>\n The search firm said that manual hijackers often get into accounts through phishing: sending deceptive messages meant to trick the user into handing over your username, password, and other personal info.<\/p>\n For its study, Google analyzed several sources of phishing messages and websites, observing both how hijackers operate and what sensitive information they seek out once they gain control of an account.<\/p>\n The group found that phishing requests target victims\u2019 email (35%) and banking institutions (21%) accounts, as well as their app stores and social networking credentials.<\/p>\n Additional Google findings:<\/strong><\/p>\n “Considering that an attacker can send out millions of messages, these success rates are nothing to sneeze at,” Google said.<\/p>\n “Since your friends and family think the email comes from you, these emails can be very effective. People in the contact list of hijacked accounts are 36 times more likely to be hijacked themselves,” Google said.<\/p>\n Internet fraud and phishing costs SA R2.2 billion<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n South Africa\u2019s $300 million phishing bill<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n
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