According to a recent report from RSA Security, phishing attacks increased 66 percent last year when compared to 2007. One reason cited for this are the increased availability of DIY (do-it-yourself) phishing kits, which are available for sale on the Internet.
Some of these kits even come with tech support. In the past few years, these kits have enabled a lot more people to get into the phishing game.
The statistics compiled in the Anti-Fraud Command Center Phishing Trends Report recorded 135,426 phishing attacks compared to 90,000 detected in 2007.
Despite these ominous numbers, the report showed a marked decrease in the number of attacks between June and July. The amount of attacks then increased steadily until the end of the year and then dropped again in December. The RSA team attributed this to a drop in activity by a notorious gang of phishermen, known as the Rock Phish.
Although, no one seems to be exactly sure, the Rock Phish are a phishing gang that are allegedly of Romanian origin. Experts believe they are responsible for up to 50 percent of the phishing seen in the wild (on the Internet) today. To avoid detection, Rock Phishing attacks often update DNS records during an attack and change URLs, which confuse take-down efforts and allow them to bypass spam filters. They also use images in their spam e-mails, which make their work harder to be detected by spam filters. A lot of spam filters do not use OCR (optical character recognition) because it slows down the filtering process.
The (temporary?) reduction in attacks was attributed to the Rock Phish upgrading their infrastructure and switching to the use of a new botnet, called the "Asprox botnet." A lot of the newer botnets — which spew out spam in the millions using zombies (compromised computers) — are using what is known are using fast flux technology. Fast flux is a DNS technique used to hide spam e-mails behind a constantly changing network of compromised computers (zombies), which have been taken over using malicious software to send out spam. Since these spam e-mails recruit new zombies all the time, it makes shutting down this type of activity pretty difficult.
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