Phished Brands Seize on Teachable Moments
Summary: An increasing number of phished brands are redirecting confirmed phishing sites to an Anti-Phishing Working Group education page instead of leaving visitors with a "Site not found" error, and Carnegie Mellon's Jason Hong measured close to 25,000 referrals per month from these modified sites. From September 2008 to April 2010, Hong tracked 1.16 million hits from roughly 15,000 unique redirected URLs, and after filtering found about 200,000 likely victim clicks across 1,285 URLs, or roughly 156 hits per URL.
Bottom line: The median was only 2-7 filtered hits per URL per month against an average of 100-300, meaning a long tail of low-traffic phish sits alongside a few campaigns that hook many people, and the APWG estimates 75-80 percent of phishing sites are legitimate sites that have been hacked and seeded with phishing kits.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
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