Phishing Sites Reached All-Time High In January 2021

The number of active phishing sites hit a record number earlier this year in January, according to an industry report published this week by the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG). The Record reports: A total of 245,771 phishing sites were detected in January. The number represents the unique base URLs of phishing sites found and reported by APWG members. The APWG is an industry coalition made up of more than 2,200 organizations from the cyber-security industry, government, law enforcement, and NGOs sector, which includes some big names such as Microsoft, Facebook, PayPal, ICANN, AT&T, Comcast, Digicert, Cloudflare, Cisco, Salesforce, RSA, Verisign, ESET, McAfee, Avast, Symantec, Trend Micro, PhishLabs, Agari, Cofense, and many others. APWG experts noted that while the number of phishing sites declined in February, the next month, in March, the number of phishing sites jumped above 200,000 again, amounting to the fourth-worst month in APWG's reporting history.

The industry vertical most targeted in phishing attacks in Q1 remained the financial sector, which saw almost a quarter of all phishing attempts. Second was social media, with cybercrime groups attempting to hijack social media accounts to resell online on specialized marketplaces, according to the APWG report (PDF). Furthermore, around 83% of all phishing sites seen in Q1 2020 were also hosted on an HTTP-based connection. This finding reinforces a piece of well-known cybersecurity advice that if a website is loaded via HTTPS, it doesn't mean it's secure, but merely that its traffic can't be easily intercepted.

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