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News >> Technology >>
India finds place in phishing list
By agencies
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Wednesday, 06 September 2006, 19:30 IST
NEW DELHI: The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) ranked India among the top ten sites that was involved in phishing in their PROJECT: Crimeware".
Phishing can be defined as a criminal activity that attempts to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as passwords and credit card details, by posing as a trustworthy person or business in an electronic communication.
The project reported the number of crimeware-spreading sites surging to all-time high in June with 2,945 such sites detected by APWG researchers. While the US has the largest number of such web sites 35.5 percent, India was given the tenth spot with 1.66 percent of the sites.
The APWG is an association that focuses on eliminating the identity theft and fraud that result from the growing problem of phishing. The data gathered by them shows that June recorded the most password stealing malicious code URLs tracked to date.
"It makes you wonder what new levels of automation phishers may be achieving to get this kind of growth. While phishers still exploit email to dupe consumers, it is clear that the entire surface of the Web is increasingly being viewed by phishers as a useful attack vector as well," said APWG Secretary General Peter Cassidy.
The number of password-stealing applications detected in APWG research performed by Websense has run between 180 and 215 and for the six months before the June report, the number of crimeware-spreading URLs ranged from 1100 to nearly 2700. Dan Hubbard, Vice President of security for Websense, Inc. attributed this to the advancement of monetary gain that is being made by utilizing crimeware applications and websites.