Phishing websites reach all-time high
- 20 July, 2012 03:05
- Comments
The number of phishing websites detected reached an all-time high earlier this year, a sign that making fake websites spoofing real ones is still a lucrative trade for cybercriminals.
In its latest report, the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) said 56,859 phishing sites were detected in February, beating the previous record high in August 2009 by nearly 1 percent. APWG is a nonprofit consortium composed of banks, security vendors and others with a stake in tracking cybercrime trends.
Phishing sites are websites that look nearly identical to the legitimate ones and often mimic known brands. Leveraging the trust users put in the legitimate companies, cybercriminals succeed in tricking victims into divulging logins, passwords and other sensitive information.
The APWG noted in its report that the increase in the number of phishing websites was in part due to new technology that it began using earlier this year to detect fraudulent sites.
More than 38 percent of the fake websites were related to financial services, according to the APWG's report. The second most spoofed market vertical was payment services, followed by retail and other service sites. The sites spoofed 392 brands, also a new record.
"All manner of commerce is transacted online today and in that are opportunities for new and provocative scams, leveraging some part of the customer-enterprise relationship that is unique to the domain," said Peter Cassidy, secretary general of the APWG. "People are tougher to fool with phishing, but they still can be in the hands of a creative scam artisan."
The U.S. hosted the most fake sites. About half of the phishing sites for the first quarter of 2012 used some form of a brand in their URL, which often tricks people.
On the bright side, though, phishing sites are being taken down faster than ever due to better security technologies. But "the problem is a lot of campaign schemes are built around deployment of lots of landing websites for a single campaign to complicate the work of putting down the attacks," Cassidy said.
Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com
- Bookmark this page
- Share this article
- Got more on this story? Email ARN
- Follow ARN on twitter
- McAfee Whitepaper: Building the Business Case for Privacy
- Smart Cloud: Move Beyond monitoring to Holistic Management of Application Performance
- Modernizing Security for the Small and Mid-Sized Business – Recommendations for 2013 (Sponsored by McAfee)
- Choice and Control: Considerations for Developing Enterprise Cloud Strategies
- Cloud and Co-Location Solutions
- CITRIX SYNERGY ’13: Look beyond Cloud infrastructure, says Liang
- CITRIX SYNERGY ’13: Christiancen highlights the need for collaboration
- CITRIX SYNERGY ’13: Devices will change how people work, says Duursma
- Are we ready for a mobile-first world?
- Smartphone chips could replace server processors in HPC, researchers say
-
Attack on Telenor was part of large cyberespionage operation with Indian origins: report
-
Box buys iOS app to improve its own
-
Growing mobile malware threat swirls (mostly) around Android
-
Barracuda Networks raises free capacity of Copy.com to 15GB
-
Coke gives peace a chance ( +16 photos)
Get exclusive access to ARN's news, research and invitation only events. 
