The Anti-Phishing Working Group has discovered that the amount of detected phishing campaigns in Q1 of 2016 hit a all time high in 12 years.
In the group’s Phishing Activity Trends Report, the APWG mentioned a 250% growth in phishing sites appearing between October 2015 and March 2016.
“The increase in December 2015 was expected, since there is usually a spate of spamming and online fraud during the holiday shopping season,” the report said. “The continuing increase into 2016 is cause for concern.”
The retail/service industry remains a highly targeted sector all through the first quarter of 2016, with 42.71% of attacks, followed by financial business at 18.67%. And, the amount of brands targeted by phishers in the first quarter stayed in the range of 406 to 431 each month.
The United States carried on its rank on top of the list of countries hosting phishing sites, while the world’s most-infected nations are China, in which 57.24% of computers are infected, accompanied by Taiwan (49.15%) and Turkey at 42.52%.
Security consciousness and knowledge of these kinds of attacks is critical for companies trying to fight this ever-growing problem. Spam filters, blacklists, firewalls, and other automated security are unable to prevent all phishing emails from reaching end users.
