Use of phishing toolkits on the rise

By Peter Dinham
Sunday, 14 June 2009 11:34

There’s been a huge increase in the use of phishing toolkits, with 42 percent of phishing URLs last month generated using the toolkits, and the emergence of a new trend of phishing attacks towards the popular social networking site, Facebook.

Symantec, in its June phishing report, says it observed an increase in URLs using phishing toolkits during May of 100 percent over the previous month, with a 14 percent decrease in non-English phishing sites compared to February.

The security firm also reports that during May, more than 98 Web hosting services were used, which accounted for six percent of all phishing attacks, which was a decrease of five percent from the previous month.

David Cowings, executive editor security response at Symantec, says phishing sites were categorised based upon the domains they leveraged and “a considerable increase was seen in the number of phishing sites using automated toolkits,” and, he adds, “this increase was a result of a large toolkit attack targeting an information services brand.”

According to Cowings, Symantec observed that 58 percent of all attacks were from unique phishing Web sites, which included more than 206 targeted known brands.

“The unique attacks decreased by nine percent from the previous month. This was the result of a sharp increase in toolkit activity as the trending of the two is usually inversely correlated.”

In relation to the use of toolkits, Symantec says that that there was a sudden increase in toolkit attacks during the first week of May, primarily targeting the information services and financial sectors, due primarily to the resurgence in phishers targeting a popular information services brand.

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