By July-End 2010, Nearly 20,000 Phishing Cases Reported To APAC

According to APAC the Anti-Phishing Alliance of China, by the time July 2010 ended, there were 19,817 incidences associated with phishing websites reported to it, with e-commerce websites, spoofed the most. Moreover, the alliance said that it dealt with nearly 19,700 reports.

States APAC that the total number of complains about phishing websites during January-July 2010 was two times or more than that of the entire 2009. As different e-commerce websites got increasingly promoted at the time of the Spring Festival leading to the rise in online shopping, there was an increase in phishing incidences.

Tencent's qq.com, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China's website and Taobao.com comprised the 3 online sites that were spoofed in the maximum number of phishing incidences, making up for more than 90% of all complaints.

Moreover, over 4,000 phony "Taobao" websites were detected as well as terminated during January-July 2010. Consequently, it becomes evident that online sites related to e-commerce that Taobao represented have gotten to be phishers' most favorite targets.

Additionally, the China Internet Information Security Report that APAC published during March 2010 revealed that in 2009, around 90% of China's inhabitants faced phishing websites mostly through instant messaging and e-mail. On calculating the resultant loss based on around 88m active Internet purchasers, the figure estimated was a mean loss of 86.5 Yuan/person.

Furthermore according to the report, owing to the phishing websites, Chinese people have been losing trust in the Internet. Consequently, the Chinese Internet's positive growth is being hampered.

And as for dealing with phishing websites, the alliance stated that following the receipt of complaints, it would submit such websites for analysis to the professional government units. When such websites would be detected as phishing sites, APAC would notify their service providers for domain name authorization and request for the termination of their DNS operations. In case the domain name registrants felt anything suspicious about the decision, an appeal would be accepted from them to the alliance's secretariat.

Besides, in case the phishing sites carried out fraud, the associated crime complaints would be forwarded for adequate dealing by the public agencies on Internet security.

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» SPAMfighter News - 8/25/2010