Facebook Phishing Increases, Making It Second Most Phished Brand

Security researchers at a German antivirus vendor 'Avira' caution that the number of phishing assaults against Facebook users rose by nearly 64% in July 2010, making the site the second most phished brand.

As per statistics released by Avira, although phishing activities against PayPal showed a major reduction of 37.30% compared to June 2010, the e-commerce site remained the most phished brand on the web with 65.45% of such attacks.

The security company claimed that the leading 10 names did not change as compared to June 2010 but the number of phishing attacks increased.

At the third place with 4.04% score, the fashionable World of Warcraft game registered a major increase of 40.58% in phishing attacks. The phishing activity against HDFC bank declined 36.42% in July. The remaining top positions were occupied by Tibia Guilds 1.58%, Craiglist (1.11%), Halifax (0.94%) and the Bank of America (0.90%).

Sorin Mustaca, Manager of International Software Development at Avira, stated that owing to the holiday season, many people started to buy games and spent more time on social media sites. Therefore, it was natural that the attacks on such sites would rise, as per the news by Softpedia on August 20, 2010.

It is worth mentioning that Tibia Guilds (a free Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG)) developed by a German company named 'CipSoft GmbH' became a new entry to the list and occupied the place of IRS.

Avira also listed the most abused TLDs (Top Level Domain) in July 2010. TLDs list remained almost the same as in June 2010 although that there were some fluctuations in the leading 5. The big concern was the fact that ".de" domain reached sixth place this month, pushing up 5 positions from June. Although the share of 2.62% is little, this could be general fluctuation.

The .com domain stood at the top of most abused TLDs with 52.58% for phishing and 45.02% for malware infection. It was followed by .org, .net, IP Addresses etc.

Related article: Facebook Users Should be Careful of a Computer Virus

» SPAMfighter News - 8/26/2010