Phishing Activity Trends Report for 4th Quarter 2016 – APWG

The APWG Phishing Activity Trends Report breaks down phishing attacks reported to the APWG by its part organizations, its Global Research Partners, through the association’s site at http://www.apwg.org, and by email entries to reportphishing@antiphishing.org.

Phishing is a fraud mechanism utilizing both social engineering and specialized subterfuge to take buyers’ individual personality information and financial accreditation’s.

The APWG likewise tracks the number of unique phishing sites. That is currently controlled by the one of a unique base URLs of the phishing sites.

Highlights for 4th Quarter 2016

• Number of unique phishing websites detected 89,232 118,928 69,533.
• Number of unique phishing e-mail reports (campaigns) received by APWG from consumers 51,153 64,324 95,555.
• Number of brands targeted by phishing campaigns 357 332 264.

Phishing domains by TLD

Here are the  top-10 TLDs where phishing attacks occurred in 4Q2016:

Some of these areas were compromised– the phishers broke into their web servers to plant phishing URLs on existing sites.

Different domains were likely enrolled by phishers particularly to bolster new phishing sites, however examination of what number of sites fell into which classification were not accessible for this report.

Phishing Activity report by Country of Hosting

It is not shocking to see a concentration in the United States – a noteworthy segment of the world’s web servers are situated in the United States, and phishing sites are frequently set on compromised web servers.

In addition, some of the fraud sites that Axur found had “IP filters.” This is a technique where the fraudsters don’t allow people on IP addresses outside of Brazil to see the fraud sites – only people inside of Brazil can see the fraud sites.

The goal is to make it more difficult for response teams at hosting provider outside of Brazil to view the active fraud, so they cannot confirm the problems and then eliminate them

According to Luis Corrons, PandaLabs Technical Director and Trends Report contributing analyst, the world’s most infected country was China, where 47.09% of machines are infected, followed by Turkey (42.88%) and Taiwan (38.98%).

Scandinavian countries have the lowest infection rates, and Sweden was lowest of all with just a 20.03% infection rate.

To download the APWG report.