Colleagues and good friends Greg Aaron and Rod Rasmussen have published the APWG Global Phishing Survey report for 1H 2014. Greg and Rod do a deep dive into phishing data and provide one of the best assessments of phishing activity you can find.
Commenting on this most recent survey, Greg explains that "It’s chock-full of information about what phishers were up to in the first half of this year, and includes key statistics about the number of attacks, uptimes, server hacking, and more. "
Some of the important findings:
- Apple became the world’s most-phished brand.
- The introduction of new top-level domains did not have an immediate impact on phishing.
- Chinese phishers were responsible for 85% of the domain names that were registered for phishing.
- The average uptimes of phishing attacks remain near historic lows, pointing to some success by anti-phishing responders.
- The companies (brands) targeted by phishing targets were diverse, with many new targets, indicating that e-criminals are looking for new opportunities in new places.
- Mass hackings of vulnerable shared hosting providers led to 20% of all phishing attacks.
Greg and Rod always provide great visuals, including rankings of phishing prevalance by registrar and TLD, comparisons of phishing uptimes, how URL shorteners factor into phishing, trends in spearphishing and more. If you want to understand phishing better or explain this threat to your management, there are really few better places to find useful, trustworthy data than here.
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