Growing number of phishing attacks

emailAPWG (Anti-Phishing Working Group) organization published the Phishing Activity Trends Report for the third quarter of 2009.

Phishing is the fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information (such as usernames, passwords) by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. This type of attack used to be only a problem for users that entered personal information into malicious web sites. Today, quality of phishing e-mails is dramatically improved. Therefore, users will probably visit any link they trust that comes from trustworthy source. According to the report, the number of unique phishing websites broke new record in August when it reached number of 56 362 sites. The country that hosted the most malware sites is United States with hosted 75.76 percent of all such sites in September of 2009. Second and third place was taken by Hong Kong and China, with 6.49 percent and 3.44 percent respectively. After nearly a decade of phishing growth, the security industry hasn't improved its ability to squash the phishing threat. Original news is published on InformationWeek web site.