The number of phishing attacks in August fell by 45 percent says a recent report by security company Symantec. The September 2009 State of Phishing report shows that the use of automated phishing toolkits fell by thirty percent. The significant decrease in both categories is attributed to the collapse of an automated toolkit that networking attacked. However researchers believe that the decline in short as possible but can be expensive.
Although a decrease in the activity of phishing toolkits may be a short-term change and the number of phishing attacks probably with the upcoming holiday party season to rise.
Symantec also concluded that the attacks in the English language with eleven percent increase and that the United States the most popular country is to host a phishing site and a phishing attack to perform. Banks are also still the most popular target.
About 33 percent of all phishing attacks were hosted in the U.S.. Dallas, Houston and Atlanta are in the ten cities where most attacks are carried out. London was in seventh place.India is at fourth place Finally, the report showed that non-English phishing attacks, most were conducted in French, Italian, Chinese and Spanish.
Phishing sites were categorized based upon the domains they leveraged. A considerable decrease was seen in the number of phishing sites being generated using phishing toolkits. This was largely due to the discontinuation of a large toolkit attack targeting a social networking site.
The following categories were analyzed:
Sectors
Number of brands
Phishing toolkits
Fraud URLs with IP addresses
Phish sites that use IP address domains – categorized by hosted cities
Use of Web hosting sites
Geo-locations of phishing sites
Non-English phishing sites
Top-Level domains of phishing sites
A total of 1115 phishing sites were hosted in 71 countries. This amounted to an increase ofapproximately five percent of IP attacks in comparison to the previous month. The United States continued to be the top ranked country hosting phishing sites. The Greater China region accounted for approximately 7 percent of IP attacks in the month. The total number of IP attacks originating from this region, reduced by 2 percent over the previous month.