Fraudsters are phishing the Internet in record numbers,according to the latest report from the APWG.

The industry consortium said at its conference in Puerto Ricothis week that phishing websites proliferated at record speed inthe first half of 2012.

And while the uptime of phishing websites – phony sites thatsteal credentials for later use by cyber thieves – dropped, meaningthey were spotted and taken down more quickly, more sites than everare appearing, the APWG said.

“Phishers seem to be concentrating their efforts on compromisinglegitimate websites using automated attack tools, or purchasingaccess to them on the burgeoning underground market,” said Rod Rasmussen, CTO of Internet Identity in Tacoma, Wash., andco-author of “Global Phishing Survey: Trends and Domain NameUse in 1H2012.”

Rasmussen said average uptimes of phishing attacks dropped to arecord low of 23 hours and 10 minutes in the first half of theyear, about half of what it was in late 2011, and by far the lowestsince the report series was inaugurated in January 2008.

But the study also found that there were more phishing attacksin the period – at least 93,462, up 12% from the last six month of2011.

The report highlights a major increase in the use of tactic thatallows a criminal phisher to create hundreds of phish at once.Shared hosting is a growing phenomenon, using Web servers that hosta large number of domains and allowing thousands of websites at atime to be infected with malware that can be used to steal fundselectronically.

The full report is available online.

Founded as the Anti-Phishing Working Group in 2003, the APWG isa global coalition of more than 2,000 industry, law enforcement andgovernment coalition members focused on unifying the response toelectronic crime.