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Australia joins list of phishing hosting countries

According to RSA's latest fraud report findings

Australia has been listed as the number seven phishing hosting nation in the world, according to figures from RSA's latest quarterly fraud report.

Findings show that Australia has just entered the top 10 list of hosting countries along with the Netherlands (no. 6) and Malaysia (no. 8).

There was a slight decrease in the number of attacks hosted in Russia, while China and Luxembourg fall off the list this quarter.

In the second quarter of 2018, phishing attacks accounted for 41 per cent of all observed fraud attacks, a slight decrease from 48 per cent in the previous quarter - Canada, the United States, and the Netherlands were the top three countries most targeted by phishing.

Attacks involving financial malware dropped from 25 per cent last quarter to 16 per cent during the second quarter of 2018.

RSA detected 9,185 rogue mobile applications, representing a 13 per cent increase from last quarter and 28 per cent of observed attacks.

The report explains that the average value of a fraudulent transaction will likely always be higher than that of a genuine transaction, since fraudsters regularly use stolen credit cards to make quick, high-value purchases because these goods are easy to resell for a profit.

In Australia and New Zealand the average credit card transaction stands at US$182.00, while a fraudulent transaction reaches US$294.00, a 47 per cent difference.

Furthermore, during the same time period, 80 per cent of fraud among e-commerce transactions originated from a new device.

In the case of known/trusted accounts, 59 per cent of fraud transaction value was from a new device, which is indicative of account takeover or password-guessing attacks where fraudsters could be attempting transactions from the same account across multiple merchants.