Phishing Activity Trends
Report for the Month of April, 2007

Summarization of April Report Findings_ The number of unique phishing websites detected by APWG rose to 55,643 in April 2007, a massive jump ofnearly 35,000 from March resulting from aggressive sub-domain phishing tactics by which phishers started
using the tactic of putting a large numbers of phish URLs on the same domain. _ Similar to tactics employed byphishing gangs in late 2006, APWG researchers encountered phishers placing thousands of phishing URLs
under the same domain. _ April 2007 saw a the number of brands being attacked rise 174 and notes that more
non-financial brands attacked including social networking, VOIP, and numerous large web-based email
providers were attacked. _ Unique phishing reports submitted to APWG in April was 23,656, a drop of over
1,000 from March. _ Financial Services continue to be the most targeted industry sector at 92.5% and the
APWG notes that several large US banks are among the most-attacked brands. Furthermore, two top banks
have been targeted for at least two months in a row. _ A large number of European banks were targeted in April
with seven of the most-targeted 20 brands in that month belonging to European banks. In addition, one of the
top 20 was a Canadian financial institution.

Phishing Defined and Report Scope
Phishing is a form of online identity theft that employs both social engineering and technical subterfuge to steal
consumers' personal identity data and financial account credentials. Social-engineering schemes use 'spoofed' emails to lead consumers to counterfeit websites designed to trick recipients into divulging financial data such asaccount usernames and passwords. Hijacking brand names of banks, e-retailers and credit card companies, phishers
often convince recipients to respond. Technical subterfuge schemes plant crimeware onto PCs to steal credentials
directly, often using key logging systems to intercept consumers online account user names and passwords, and tocorrupt local and remote navigational infrastructures to misdirect consumers to counterfeit websites and to authentic
websites through phisher-controlled proxies that can be used to monitor and intercept consumers’ keystrokes.
The monthly Phishing Activity Trends Report analyzes phishing attacks reported to the Anti-Phishing Working Group(APWG) via its member companies, Global Research Partners, the organization’s website at
http://www.antiphishing.org and email submission to reportphishing@antiphishing.org. The APWG phishing attack
repository is the Internet’s most comprehensive archive of email fraud and phishing activity. The APWG additionallymeasures the evolution, proliferation and propagation of crimeware drawing from the independent research of ourmember companies. In the second half of this report are tabulations of crimeware statistics and reportage on specificcriminal software detected by our member researchers.

Statistical Highlights for April 2007
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Number of unique phishing reports received in April:
Number of unique phishing sites received in April:
Number of brands hijacked by phishing campaigns in April:
Number of brands comprising the top 80% of phishing campaigns in April:Country hosting the most phishing websites in April:Contain some form of target name in URL:
No hostname just IP address:
Percentage of sites not using port 80:
Average time online for site:
Longest time online for site:

Anti-Phishing Working Group
http://www.antiphishing.org _ info@antiphishing.org

23656
55643
172
11
United States
13.5 %
6%
1.5 %3.8 days
27 daysMethodology
APWG is continuing to refine and develop our tracking and reporting methodology. We have recently re-instated thetracking and reporting of unique phishing reports (email campaigns) in addition to unique phishing sites. An email
campaign is a unique email sent out to multiple users, directing them to a specific phishing web site, (multiple
campaigns may point to the same web site). APWG counts unique phishing report emails as those in a given monthwith the same subject line in the email.
APWG also tracks the number of unique phishing websites. This is now determined by unique base URLs of thephishing sites.
APWG is also tracking crimeware instances (unique software applications as determined by MD5 hash of thecrimeware sample) as well as unique sties that are distributing crimeware (typically via browser drive-by exploits).

Phishing Email Reports and Phishing Site Trends for April 2007
The total number of unique phishing reports submitted to APWG in April 2007 was 23,656, a drop of over 1,000 fromthe previous month. This is a count of unique phishing email reports received by the APWG from the public, its
members and its research partners.

Phishing Reports Received April '06 - April '07
29930

28571
28000

26877

26150
23670

24000

25816
23787

23610

DecemberFebruary

22136

24853

23656

20109
20000

17490

16000
12000
8000
4000
0
April

June

AugustOctoberApril

The Phishing Attack Trends Report is published monthly by the Anti-Phishing Working Group, an industry association focusedon eliminating the identity theft and fraud that result from the growing problem of phishing and email spoofing. For further
information, please contact APWG Secretary General Peter Cassidy at 617.669.1123. Analysis for the Phishing Attack Trends
Report has been donated by the following companies:

Anti-Phishing Working Group
http://www.antiphishing.org _ info@antiphishing.org

The number of unique phishing websites detected by APWG was 55,643 in April 2007, a massive increase of nearly
35,000 from March, the result of from aggressive tactics used to establish multiple URLs on a common domain. Laura
Mather, Ph.D., Senior Scientist at MarkMonitor said, "In April the phishers started using the tactic of putting a large
numbers of phish URLs on the same domain, similar to what they were doing in late 2006. We have seen cases
where the phisher will put thousands of URLs on the same domain. They do this to get around website blocking that
Internet Explorer 7.0 and Firefox 2 have deployed to protect consumers from phish sites.”

New Phishing Sites by Month April '06 - April '07
60000
55643
55000
50000
45000
37444 37439
40000
35000
28531 27221
30000
24565
25000
20871
20000
16463
11976
14191
15000 11121
10047
10091
10000
5000
0
April

June

AugustOctober

DecemberFebruary

April

Typically, URL multiplying techniques involve apparently automated creation of subdomains (xxxx.fakedomain.com)
to establish discrete hosts for phishing sites or the use of different directories on the same domain(www.fakedomain.com/xxxx). APWG researchers have watched these tactics increase in frequency since last fall and,after a lull this spring, phishers have returned to these techniques with redoubled effort. Phish sites rose 166% in
April from the previous month and 48% from the previous high for phishing URLs in October, 2006.

Top Used Ports Hosting Phishing Data Collection Servers in April 2007
April saw a continuation of
HTTP port 80 being themost popular port used at
98.83% of all phishing sites
reported.

Port 84(.44%)

Port 80(98.83%)Anti-Phishing Working Group
http://www.antiphishing.org _ info@antiphishing.org

Port 8080(.3%)
3 other ports<.2% (.43%)

Brands & Legitimate Entities Hijacked By Email Phishing Attacks in April 2007
Number ofReported Brands
April 2007 saw a continuing
increase in hijacked brands thatstarted in February, rising to174. APWG notes that in April,more non-financial brands wereattacked including social
networking, VOIP, andnumerous large web-based
email providers.

Hijacked Brands by Month
April '06 - April '07

137 130

160
120

176

154 148

92

117

120

146 135 135

166 174

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Most Targeted Industry Sectors in April 2007
Financial Services continue to be the mosttargeted industry sector at 92.5% of all
attacks in the month of April. APWG notesthat several fairly large US banks are the top
brands attacked, and these two top banks
have been targeted in two consecutive
months.
In addition, a large amount of European
banks were being targeted and are seven of
the top 20 brands attacked in April. In
addition, one of the top 20 brands was a
Canadian financial institution.

ISP (2.9%)
Retail (1.7%)
Government &Miscellaneous(2.4%)
Financial
Services(92.5%)

Anti-Phishing Working Group
http://www.antiphishing.org _ info@antiphishing.org

Web Phishing Attack Trends in April 2007
Countries Hosting Phishing Sites
In April, Websense® Security Labs™ saw the United States remain on the top of the list for countries hosting phishingwebsites with 28.44%. The rest of the top 10 breakdown is as follows: France 26.9%, Republic of Korea 21.05%,
Romania 2.04%, China 1.9%, Germany 1.9%, Russia 1.75%, United Kingdom 1.46%, Turkey 1.46%,
Netherlands 1.17%.

Top 10 Phishing Sites Hosting Countries
China
Germany
FranceRepublic of Kore

Chile
United Kingdom
RussiaCanadaJapan

United StatePROJECT: Crimeware
Crimeware Taxonomy & Samples According to Classification in April 2007
PROJECT: Crimeware categorizes crimeware attacks as follows, though the taxonomy will grow as variations inattack code are spawned:

Phishing-based Trojans - Keyloggers
Definition: Crimeware code which is designed with the intent of collecting information on the end-user in order tosteal those users' credentials. Unlike most generic keyloggers, phishing-based keyloggers have tracking components
which attempt to monitor specific actions (and specific organizations, most importantly financial institutions and online
retailers and ecommerce merchants) in order to target specific information, the most common are; access to financial
based websites, ecommerce sites, and web-based mail sites.

Anti-Phishing Working Group
http://www.antiphishing.org _ info@antiphishing.org

Phishing-based Trojans – Keyloggers, Unique Variants in April

Password Stealing Malicious Code
Unique Applications
340 345
182 172

216 237 230

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215 212

Ju
ly

180

306
260

Ap
ril

289

Ap
ril
M
ay
Ju
ne

400
350
300
250
200
150
100
50
0

Phishing-based Trojans – Keyloggers, Unique Websites Hosting Keyloggers in April

Password Stealing Malicious Code URLs
3500
3000 2683
2500
2100
2000
1500

3121

2945
2303
1850

2122

2201
1800 1899

1750

1486

1721

1000
500

Anti-Phishing Working Group
http://www.antiphishing.org _ info@antiphishing.org

Ap
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Ap
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0

Phishing-based Trojans – Redirectors
Definition: Crimeware code which is designed with the intent of redirecting end-users network traffic to a location
where it was not intended to go to. This includes crimeware that changes hosts files and other DNS specificinformation, crimeware browser-helper objects that redirect users to fraudulent sites, and crimeware that may install a
network level driver or filter to redirect users to fraudulent locations. All of these must be installed with the intention ofcompromising information which could lead to identify theft or other credentials being taken with criminal intent.
Along with phishing-based keyloggers we are seeing high increases in traffic redirectors. In particular the highest
volume is in malicious code which simply modifies your DNS server settings or your hosts file to redirect either somespecific DNS lookups or all DNS lookups to a fraudulent DNS server. The fraudulent server replies with “good”
answers for most domains, however when they want to direct you to a fraudulent one, they simply modify their nameserver responses. This is particularly effective because the attackers can redirect any of the users requests at any
time and the end-users have very little indication that this is happening as they could be typing in the address on theirown and not following an email or Instant Messaging lure.

Phishing-based Trojans & Downloader’s Hosting Countries (by IP address) in April
The chart below represents a breakdown of the websites which were classified during April as hosting malicious codein the form of either a phishing-based keylogger or a Trojan downloader which downloads a keylogger.
The United States continues to be the top hosting country with 38.57%.
The rest of the breakdown was as follows; China 37.64%, Russia 8.87%, Republic of Korea 3.57%, Brazil 2.33%
Taiwan 2.02%, Germany 1.87%, France 1.55%, Ukraine 0.93%, Sweden 0.93%.

Top 10 Phishing Based Keylogger and Trojan
Downloaders by Hosting Country
China

RussiaRepublic of Korea
BrazilTaiwanGermany
FranceUkraineSwedenUnited States

Anti-Phishing Working Group
http://www.antiphishing.org _ info@antiphishing.org

Phishing Research ContributorsdMarkMonitor

PandaLabs

Websense Security Labs

MarkMonitor is the global leader
in delivering comprehensive
online corporate identity
protection services, with a focus
on making the Internet safe foronline transactions.

PandaLabs is an international
network of research andtechnical support centersdevoted to protecting users
against malware.

Websense Security Labs mission
is to discover, investigate, andreport on advanced internet
threats to protect employee
computing environments.

For media inquiries please contact Peter Cassidy, APWG Secretary General at 617.669.1123 or
pcassidy@antiphishing.org and Cas Purdy at 858.320.9493 or cpurdy@websense.com.

About the Anti-Phishing Working GroupThe Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) is an industry association focused on eliminating the identity theft and fraudthat result from the growing problem of phishing and email spoofing. The organization provides a forum to discussphishing issues, define the scope of the phishing problem in terms of hard and soft costs, and share information andbest practices for eliminating the problem. Where appropriate, the APWG will also look to share this information withlaw enforcement.
Membership is open to qualified financial institutions, online retailers, ISPs, the law enforcement community, andsolutions providers. There are more than 1600 companies and government agencies participating in the APWG andmore than 2600 members. Note that because phishing attacks and email fraud are sensitive subjects for manyorganizations that do business online, the APWG has a policy of maintaining the confidentiality of member
organizations.
The website of the Anti-Phishing Working Group is http://www.antiphishing.org. It serves as a public and industry
resource for information about the problem of phishing and email fraud, including identification and promotion ofpragmatic technical solutions that can provide immediate protection and benefits against phishing attacks. The
analysis, forensics, and archival of phishing attacks to the website are currently powered by Tumbleweed
Communications' Message Protection Lab.
The APWG, a 501c6 tax-exempted corporation, was founded by Tumbleweed Communications and a number ofmember banks, financial services institutions, and e-commerce providers. It held its first meeting in November 2003 in
San Francisco and in June 2004 was incorporated as an independent corporation controlled by its steering committee,
its board and its executives.

Anti-Phishing Working Group
http://www.antiphishing.org _ info@antiphishing.org