Phishing Attacks Accelerate

In January, there were 176 new, unique phishing attacks reported to the Anti-Phishing Working Group. This was a 52% increase over the number of attacks reported in December. While the average number of phishing attacks per day in January was 5.7, analyzing this information on a weekly basis shows an increasing trend with a peak of 7.1 attacks per day in the third week of January.

Other interesting results from this analysis include the following:

• The company most-targeted by phishing attacks in January was, once again, eBay
• The most-targeted industry sector was Financial Services
• 8% of the reported phishing attacks took advantage of the recently patched Microsoft IE browser vulnerability that allows Web site addresses to be disguised
• Phishing attacks that fool recipients into downloading keyloggers and other Trojan programs represent an emerging threat, and illustrate the growing sophistication of phishing attacks