Phishing records broken in July

Highest ever numbers of phishing sites and brands, reports APWG.

154 brands were recorded as targets for phishing attempts in July, according to the

Anti Phishing Working Group

(

APWG

), a global coalition dedicated to fighting online fraud, in its report of statistics for the month. The figure is the highest since the

APWG

began collating its figures. Over 93% of those targeted were financial service institutions.

Also in the report were the number of individual phishing sites spotted (14,191), the average uptime of a phishing site (4.8 days) and the longest recorded uptime for a site (31 days). Almost 30% of these sites were hosted in the US.

Contributing data to the report were, among others,

Panda Software

and

Websense

. A

report covering August

, compiled by

RSA Security

, implies the number of targeted brands later fell rapidly.

The full

APWG

report can be found (in PDF format)

here

. Learn more about the project at their

homepage

.

Posted on 12 September 2006 by

Virus Bulletin