Phishing E-mail Volume Sets a New Record After a Summer Swoon

The phishing scourge made a comeback in October, hitting a new record level after three straight months of decline. The number of reported, unique phishing e-mails came to 15,820, up 17% from the 13,562 reported in September, according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, a consortium of electronic payment companies, software vendors, and law-enforcement agencies that tracks the crime. After peaking at 15,050 in June, the number of unique e-mails had been dropping each month through the summer. October's phishing volume is also more than twice the number of phishing e-mails reported in October 2004 (6,957), according to the APWG. The good news in the latest report is that, despite the sharp rise in e-mails, the number of new Web sites set up by phishing fraudsters and detected by the APWG fell 17%, to 4,367. This represents the second consecutive month of decline in this indicator, from a peak of 5,259 sites in August. Still, the number of new sites reported for October is nearly four times greater than that for October 2004. The average time a site remains online is 5.5 days, with the longest-lived site going for 31 days, the APWG report says. In phishing frauds, criminals send waves of e-mails to consumers to bilk them into visiting bogus sites, where they collect confidential data, such as PINs and passwords, from the unsuspecting victims. Banks and online merchants regard phishing as a serious threat to e-commerce, since it undermines consumer trust in the medium and jeopardizes a low-cost channel for transactions.