Tech Shout!

On Monday, the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) announced that in the month of July phishers had targeted 154 different brands, which marks a 20 percent rise from June and 12 percent higher than the previous record. However there was some good news in the report aswell, as the overall number of campaigns launched dropped to 23,670 - down almost 5,000 from the previous month. At the same time the overall number of phishing sites shot up to 14,191, also a new record.

Phishing is where criminals try to lure internet users to spoof company websites in an attempt to glean sensitive information.

APWG Chairman Dave Jevans said, “Criminals are spoofing the brands of smaller financial institutions, ISPs and even government agencies in an attempt to steal consumers’ identity information and account passwords. Combined with ever increasing technical sophistication, the fact is that nobody is immune from possible attack.”

The report was released on September 11, and also includes statistics on the average time online for a phishing site (4.8 days), the number of phishing sites referenced only by IP address instead of a domain name (42%), and the country with the largest number of malicious phishing sites (the United States, with approximately 30% of all phishing sites).