According to the Kaspersky report, Portugal is the second country in the world with the most phishing victims, accounting for 19.73% of total attacks worldwide.

The year 2020 was marked worldwide by the emergence of the COVID 19 pandemic, which we are still continuing to fight in 2021.  Consequently it was a year of many changes. Telecommuting was adopted en masse and several changes to online communications This ended up generating a increase in spam and phishing worldwide. Portugal was one of the countries that suffered most from this type of cyberattack, ranking 2nd in the table.

According to Kaspersky's report, last year around 430 million attempted phishing attacks - cybercrime in which one or more targets are contacted by email, phone or sms by someone posing as a legitimate institution to lure individuals into providing their confidential data, such as personal identification, banking, credit card information and passwords - were identified worldwide. Brazil once again tops the table of countries with the highest number of phishing victims (19.94%). However, the indicators for both countries are down, relative to 2019.

Cybercriminals have used the Covid-19 theme as bait to expand their attacks, a trend that continues to remain throughout 2021.