Phishing Attack Shot Up Sharply, but, Spam Email Goes Down

According to a new report from Symantec, phishing attack rose sharply and the spam email declined at its lowest level since 2008. As of Sept 2010, phishing accounts 89.4% of all emails, down from 92.5% in August. However, the phishing attempt increased by 52% compared to the month before. Meanwhile, the number of phishing websites, generated by automatic toolkits, increased by 46%, unique URLs increased by 83% and phishing websites with all-numeric IP domains — such as https://255.255.255.255 went up approximately by 35%.

“This [phishing increase] was primarily due to an increase in both automated toolkit attacks and unique phishing websites,” said Symantec.

Symantec report continued that the possible reason for declination of spam could be the shutdown of spam site like spamit.com, McColo and the recent Zeus arrests made by FBI and enforcement department. McColo itself served 75% of world’s spam. Interestingly, Symantec also found phishing attacks through social networks are rising, which is a 38% jump in September from August.  Only 79 free website hosting services accounted for 83% of all phishing attacks, while the others were hosted on websites with newly registered domain names or authentic domains that had been compromised. The mostly used phishing attempts are fake prize, porn or poker.