WhatsApp, Telegram top targets for phishing scammers, says Kaspersky report

Acybersecurity report by Kaspersky Internet Security has shown that social media platforms have become a key medium of cyber attacks with WhatsApp and Telegram being the biggest social vectors.

The report shows that WhatsApp emerged the most compromised social platform with roughly 85 percent of malicious links sent through the platform, while Telegram comes a very distant second with 5.7 percent of social phishing attacks between December 2020 and May 2021. Viber followed with 4.9 percent and Google Hangouts had 1 percent.

The internet security company said the biggest number of malicious links were detected in WhatsApp partly because it is the most popular messenger globally whilst also adding that the instant messenger offers one of the easiest ways to share messages to a large number of people at once, making porous to quick propagation of malicious messages.

Research shows that messenger apps surpassed social networks by 20 percent in 2020, in terms of popularity among users, thus becoming the most popular tool for communication. Similarly, a 2020 survey shows that the global audience for messengers amounted to 2.7 billion people, and by 2023 it is expected to grow to 3.1 billion, almost 40 percent of the world’s population. While phishing has become one of the most popular tools for scammers in 2020, Google detected 2.1 million phishing sites, increasing from about 1.5 million in 2019. According to Google, this indicates the highest increase rate in phishing sites ever. Expectedly, this number will further increase in 2021 as people continue to work from home. To mitigate the risk of falling foul of scams and receiving malicious links across messenger, the internet security has urged users to be vigilant and look for misspellings or other irregularities in links whilst also avoiding sharing suspicious links with contacts.