Crimeware Websites Volume Grows to an All-Time High

The Anti-Phishing Working Group has released to the public the statistics of a study describing the status of crimeware related Websites in June 2006. "The APWG phishing attack repository is thep Internet's most comprehensive archive of email fraud and phishing activity. The APWG additionally measures the evolution, proliferation and propagation of crimeware drawing from the independent research of our member companies," stated the researcher.

According to APWG, the United States are the global hot spot for phishing sites. The volume of phishing websites reports in June has skyrocketed, increasing by over 8,000 compared to the previous month and reaching 28,571. Additionally the APWG revealed that it has detected 9,255 unique phishing Websites. Out of the total number of phishing sites, 94.1% used HTTP port 80, 41% had just an IP address and no hostname. As for longevity, the longest period a phishing site remained online is 31 days while the average up-time was 4.8 days.

"June 2006 showed a slight reduction of brands hijacked from May 2006. Still, this is the second highest number of different types of brands ever recorded by the APWG," the APWG confirmed the general descendant trend of brand hijack. Phishing attacks targeted 130 brands in June, compared to 137 in May.

"We have seen the most password stealing malicious code URLs tracked to date," said Dan Hubbard, vice president of security for Websense, Inc, the company which produced the report for APWG. "We attribute this to the advancement of monetary gain that is being made by utilising crimeware applications and websites. This is also attributed to the increased use of exploit kits being sold and bought on the Internet. The kits allow non-technical criminals to infect websites with malicious exploit code with the intent of running it upon users visiting a website."

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