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PayPal was Brand Subjected to Most Phishing Attacks

According to Avira a German security company, more than half of the entire phishing attacks during February 2010 targeted PayPal.

Evidently, Avira's February 2010 figures on phishing indicate that of all the distinct phishing URLs established during the month, 52.92% disguised as services from PayPal. This shows a 31.03% deviation from January 2010 as during that month the number of PayPal spoofed web-links counted 61.89%.

Last month (February 2010), phishers again began targeting eBay, which came on the 2nd spot following PayPal on the Top Ten List of most phished brands. The company accounted for more-or-less 10% of all phished brands that was 25.88% more in comparison to that of January 2010.

Other most phished brands among the top ten were Facebook (7.37%), HSBC Bank (6.33%) and IRS (6.22%). Moreover, the brands that reported the highest increase in phishing assaults in their name from January 2010 were Visa (68.5%), Facebook (59.54%) and IRS (41.91%).

Note the security researchers that although phishing assaults targeted at PayPal continued to decline during January-February 2010, this brand was phished most heavily following a tremendous increase in December 2009. During that month, the online shopping frenzy for the holiday resulted in an unexpected wave of phishing campaigns related to PayPal.

According to a report for August 2009 by Kaspersky Lab, PayPal along with eBay its parent organization, was targeted in over 60% of online phishing instances. However, Avira says that the number of targeted phishing e-mails related to PayPal wasn't significant when compared to those, for the greater part of 2009, in the case of Chase Bank and eBay. Of the latter two brands, Chase displayed a minor gain in phishing attacks.

Meanwhile, Avira also outlines the domains that were most used to support phishing websites as well as malware during February 2010. A noticeable change observed since January 2010 was that there was over 64% increase in .ru domains utility-wise in just 1-month. In Avira's Top Fifteen List, .ru domains occupied the third position.

Furthermore, the use of .cn domains stopped, with them accounting for a lot less than 1% of the total URLs during February 2010.

Related article: Paypal – Web Hosting Services Need To Work Hard To Tackle Phishing

» SPAMfighter News - 3/13/2010

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