Originally published February 26 2006
eBay, PayPal targeted by phishers
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
In 2005, eBay and its associated PayPal payment service were the two largest targets of phishers, with 62 percent of more than 41,000 phishing URLS targeting them, according to the U.K.-based Web performance and anti-phishing firm Netcraft.
eBay and its associated PayPal payment service were the two biggest targets of phishers during 2005, a U.K.-based Web performance and anti-phishing firm said this weekend.
Of the more than 41,000 phishing URLs that Netcraft confirmed in 2005, 62 percent targeted eBay and PayPal.
Many were what Netcraft dubbed "insta-spoofs," bogus URLs hosted from free sites or compromised machines, the latter often courtesy of a botnet.
"Many of these spoof sites bear identical structures and file titles, suggesting deployment via kits that can be rapidly unpacked on a new machine," Netcraft stated in an online brief.
eBay and PayPal remain the top targets for a simple reason: it's where the people are.
"eBay and PayPal have more than 68 million active users between them, all of whom use e-mail, meaning bulk phishing e-mails will get a higher percentage of "hits" than other potential financial targets," the U.K.-based company said.
Netcraft also reviewed a 5,000-site sample of phishing URLs to find their country of origin, and tagged Rumania and Russia as the only nations whose top-level domains accounted for more than 1 percent of the year's phishing sites.
(The bulk used the generic .com top-level domain.)
Romania, in fact, hosted 1,397 phishing sites in 2005, or about 3.3 percent of all .ro hostnames.
Only South Korea, said Netcraft, hosts a higher percentage of phishing URLs (3,807 phishing URLs, or 9.1 percent of all sites with the .kr domain).
Netcraft provides a free-of-charge anti-phishing toolbar for the Windows versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox.
The toolbar can be downloaded from the Netcraft site.
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