WASHINGTON — October set a new record for phishing Web sites as well as the number of brands attacked, mostly financial services related, the Anti-Phishing Working Group reported.
According to Phishing Activity Trends Report, a monthly online publication from APWG, the number of unique phishing URLs jumped to 37,444 in October, up 236% from April and 757% from last October. September's figure was 24,565.
APWG contributing analysts from MarkMonitor assessed that most of the increase was likely due to phishing campaigns involving a large number of sites with URLs with multiple subdomains attached to the spoof domains. The idea behind multiple subdomains is to get around spam filters and URL-filtering systems.
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The number of brands attacked during October was another record at 176. That is up from the previous record of 154 brands set in July. More than 92% were financial services providers. Just 18 brands account for 80% of the phishing campaigns.
The average time online for one of these sites was 4.5 days, but the longest reached up to 30 days.
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