April 2007 Phishing Attacks Report

The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), an international coalition of industry groups whose aim is to combat Internet identity theft, just released its April 2007 report on phishing trends.

Phishing involves the use of messages made to look like they come from a legitimate website such as a financial institution in an attempt to get consumers to divulge personal data that can then be used for fraudulent ends.

"The number of unique phishing websites detected by APWG rose to 55,643 in April 2007, a massive jump of nearly 35,000 from March resulting from aggressive sub-domain phishing tactics by which phishers started using the tactic of putting a large numbers of phish URLs on the same domain (...) April 2007 saw a the number of brands being attacked rise (to) 174 and notes that more non-financial brands attacked including social networking, VOIP, and numerous large web-based email providers were attacked".

"Financial Services continue to be the most targeted industry sector at 92.5% and the APWG notes that several large US banks are among the most-attacked brands. Furthermore, two top banks have been targeted for at least two months in a row. A large number of European banks were targeted in April with seven of the most-targeted 20 brands in that month belonging to European banks. In addition, one of the top 20 was a Canadian financial institution".