Phishing attacks rose 21 percent in June
Monday, July 13, 2009
Spam email used to lure recipients into disclosing personal data such as credit card numbers - called phishing - rose by 21 percent in the month of June, according to web security firm Symantec. The United States remained the top hosting country of the attacks.
In the antivirus vendor's July State of Phishing report, Symantec said 38 percent of phishing websites in the month of June were generated using automated phishing toolkits.
Brands targeted by cyber-scammers were mainly in the financial sector (80 percent). Unique phishing websites accounted for 62 percent of all attacks, targeting 208 known brands. Unique sites rose 27 percent in June.
"The increase was likely a result of phishers evading the phishing mitigation tactics of several web hosting companies to their benefit" and an overall increase in the volume of phishing activity in June, the report said.
Symantec observed a spike in phishing websites using free web-hosting services, surging up 96 percent to account for 10 percent of all phishing sites.
Phishing emails were circulating last month that appeared to come from Microsoft and asked recipients to reconfigure their Outlook account by clicking on a link to a website where users are asked to fill in their account information.
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