Banks in the UK are subject to the second highest level of phishing attacks in the world, according to new figures.

Research from security firm RSA found that attacks on UK financial institutions make up some 16 per cent of the total.

Only the US has a higher percentage of phishing attacks aimed at its banks, with a staggering 60 per cent.

Networks across the Atlantic also account for the origins of some 47 per cent of phishing attacks, while 22 per cent come from China and just three per cent from the UK.

In the majority of phishing attacks, fake emails are sent to bank customers asking them to log in to their account and providing a fake link to a compromised login page.

The difficulty in detecting these false websites has increased recently as the hackers have begun to use international Unicode characters in their fake site domain names.

These are virtually identical to normal alphabetic characters but will send the surfer off to a different webpage, meaning that a web user can no longer get a hint whether the site is real or not simply by glancing at the address bar.