MOSCOW, June 21 (RAPSI) - The number of users who faced phishing attacks in the past 12 months has grown by 87%, from 19.9 million to 37.3 million, Digit.ru reports, citing Kaspersky Lab's The Evolution of Phishing Attacks 2011-2013 survey. 

Phishing is the act of attempting to acquire information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. 

For a long time, phishing was regarded as a variation of typical spam emails, but the situation has changed dramatically, Kaspersky Lab reports. Only 12% of all registered phishing attacks were launched via spam mail, and the other 88% came from links to phishing pages, which people followed while using their browser, messaging system (such as Skype) or other computer programs.

The majority of attacks, 18.72%, were reported in Russia, the United States (12.29%), India (9.92%) and Germany (6.22%). The number of phishing attacks has more than doubled in Vietnam, the United States, India and Germany in the past year.

The majority of servers hosting phishing pages were registered in the United States, the UK, Germany, Russia and India. Over half (57%) of the identified unique attack sources were found in just 10 countries.