Phishing For the Long Tail
Spammers, phishers and pharmers, Ohy My. This article on News.com caught my, Phishers catch on to the Net’s ‘long tail’, mainly because the Long Tail has been referenced here so many times. Apparently, it applies to phishing as well as ecommerce.
The number of brands exploited by online con artists grew to a record 154 in July, according to a report from the Anti-Phishing Working Group.
The study, released on Monday, showed that the number of brands under attack from phishing was up 20 percent from June and 12 percent from the previous record in May. The APWG findings indicate that scammers are no longer content to exploit only the best-known brands.
The top 80 percent of scams were concentrated on 15 brands, according to the report. However, the number of brands targeted by the remaining 20 percent is a sign that the so-called “long tail” effect is beginning to apply to the world of cybercrime.
Which country hosts the most phishing sites? The United States with 27.7%, followed by Russia, Brazil, China, Korea, Germany, Canada, Portugal, Italy and Spain.
From the PDF, In July, Websense found a malicious website that distributed code that installs a trojan horse on users’ computers, usually without their knowledge. This website mirrored a World Cup 2006 Soccer site, and it featured the Zinedine Zidane head butt incident. The site infected users with a trojan hirse downloader, created by the Web Attacker toolkit, which then downloaded additional code from the website. So that’s two different occasions in which attackers exploited users looking for World Cup news, Wayne and Factime found websites using blogspot, MSN and the World Cup to redirect users to adult dvd sites when searching for soccer terms. More detail and info here.
I would expect we’ll see a seasonal trend as the tail whips around and the popular search terms change.
