The Security Skeptic

Our Interisle team today announced the publication of an industry report, Phishing Landscape 2024, A Study of the Scope and Distribution of Phishing. Interisle’s fourth annual study examines nearly four million phishing reports collected from May 2023 to April 2024 and provides historical measurements using over 15 million phishing reports collected at the Cybercrime Information Center over a four year period. Findings from the study: • The total number of phishing attacks grew to ~1.9 million incidents worldwide. • Phishing attacks hosted at subdomain providers increased by 450,000+ reported names, representing 24% of all phishing attacks. • The use of...

2024 began with a rise in domain names reported for hosting malware unlike any we have seen since we began measuring malware attacks in 2021. The 1Q2024 Top 20 TLDs included 10 new gTLDs, 6 ccTLDs, and 4 legacy gTLDs. Only three TLDs remained in the top 5 TLDs (COM, NET, INFO) from the prior quarter. The ORG and BR TLDs were replaced by SHOP (over 3,000% increase) and TOP (over 700% increase). All but one registrar in 1Q2024’s Top 20 registrar ranking showed increases of 100% or more. Several registrars had 4- and 5-figure percentage increases in domains reported....

2024 began with a rise in domain names reported for hosting malware unlike any we have seen since we began measuring malware attacks in 2021. The 1Q2024 Top 20 TLDs included 10 new gTLDs, 6 ccTLDs, and 4 legacy gTLDs. Only three TLDs remained in the top 5 TLDs (COM, NET, INFO) from the prior quarter. The ORG and BR TLDs were replaced by SHOP (over 3,000% increase) and TOP (over 700% increase). All but one registrar in 1Q2024’s Top 20 registrar ranking showed increases of 100% or more. Several registrars had 4- and 5-figure percentage increases in domains reported....

Phishers have long embedded exact matches of brands in domain names that they register for phishing. Company, service, or product names in domains continue to deceive less technically savvy members of society. Phishers are increasingly using exact match strings to compose hostnames at free web sites for phishing. My Interisle colleagues and I looked at the web site domains and subdomains used in phishing attacks from November 2023 through January 2024. During that period, impersonation attacks against two brands stood out: United States Postal Service (USPS) and Facebook. Looking closely at these two brands, we are able to illustrate how...

The Spamhaus team recently interviewed me to learn more about Interisle's recent study, Cybercrime Supply Chain 2023, where we examine the supply chains used by cybercriminals to acquire resources for malware, spam, and phishing attacks. In Trends, policy and cheap TLDs - an interview with Dave Piscitello (Part 1), we dive into some of the study's key findings: Nearly 5 million domain names identified as resources for cybercrime. Over 1 million new gTLD domain names reported for spam activity. Over 500,000 subdomain hostnames reported as cybercrime resources at 229 subdomain resellers. The United States, China, India, Australia, and Hong Kong...