Domain Registration Related News
Phishing Attacks Rise by 50% month on month
Feb 2004
There were 176 unique phishing attacks in
January, a 52 percent increase from December,
according to data from the Anti Phishing Working
Group, an industry association tracking phishing
and e-mail spoofing. The number of scams continued
to increase throughout the month, averaging more
than seven separate scams per day by the third
week in January.
Nearly a third of the attacks in January used the
"@" user authentication syntax to construct
disguised URLs in links. A Microsoft security
patch released Feb. 2 disabled that capability in
the Internet Explorer browser. A smaller number -
seven percent of January attacks - exploited an IE
flaw that causes the browser to display an
incorrect URL in its address and status bars.
"In addition to the increasing volume, we are
starting to see a number of phishing attacks that
are 'repeats' - these attacks were sent out
previously, and identical versions of these
attacks appear to have beeen sent out again," the
working group said in its analysis. All told, 13.6
percent of attacks were repeats of earlier scams.
Nearly three-quarters of the attacks focused on
four target institutions - eBay (51), Citibank
(35), America Online (34) and PayPal (10).
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