PITTSBURGH, Pa. -- Phishing continues to be popular among the cyber-criminal crowd, the Anti-Phishing Working Group says.
The industry consortium's latest Phishing Activity Trends Report for the month of August says that the total number of unique reports submitted to the group was 25,624, an increase of 10% from July.
The organization, which released the authoritative report last week, also says it detected 32,079 phishing Web sites in August, an increase of more than 2,000 from the month before, and that there were 294 unique variants of phishing-based Trojan keyloggers detected, continuing a four-month upward trend.
Meanwhile, the group says, the average time before a site to be up and running fell to a new low of 3.3 days, apparently as a result of increased vigilance in take-down routines by phishing fighters and because of the fraudsters' own new routine of deploying multiple sites for short durations.
The APWG also says the United States regained the dubious honor of hosting the most sites, at 25.72%, after China was the leader in that statistic in July.
One that hasn't changed is the cyber-crooks' favorite phishing hole: 93.8% of all attacks in August were against financial services providers.
