Phishing is a fairly simple way of tricking Internet users into handing over their personal and financial information. The attackers create new phishing links every minute and now phishing sites typically operate for just a few hours.
Kaspersky Lab has released data about the new phishing wildcards that have been added to the company’s anti-phishing database every month. According to the report, there were 96,609 new phishing wild cards every month in 2013 but this count has risen sharply in 2014. This year the average number is up to 113,500 per month, an increase of 17.5 percent. Not only is Kaspersky Lab seeing more false links, but also these links are quickly taken down in an attempt to avoid detection
“This strategy is intended to make it impossible for their site to earn a bad reputation and take its place in the anti-phishing databases established by security companies. This in turn changes the rules of the game for developing anti-phishing products: now we must carefully monitor the relevance of the phishing wildcards stored in the database. We are working with ‘perishable’ malware so a quick reaction to every update is critical.” explains Nadezhda Demidova, Content Analyst at Kaspersky Lab
Detecting this everchanging phishing sites thus requires anti-phishing solutions to carefully monitor and update phishing wildcards stored in the database. For instance, Kaspersky Lab’s anti-phishing solution combines a database of phishing wildcards on the endpoint with a constantly updated database in the cloud and heuristic analysis. By doing so, if a URL is not listed in any database, the heuristic module will look for evidence of anything suspicious in both the URL and the HTML content of the website.
Kaspersky Lab has provided additional precautionary measures to help steer clear from phishing sites.
- Do not click links on suspicious sites or those you receive from untrusted sources via email
- Enter all addresses into the browser address bar manually
- Check the address bar immediately after downloading the page to ensure the domain name corresponds to the one you expect
- Check whether the site uses a secure connection
- If you have the slightest doubt about the authenticity of the site, do not enter your personal details in any circumstances
- To ensure the legitimacy of a page, contact the company via its official website
- Avoid entering your sensitive data while using a public Wi-Fi network
- Use an anti-phishing security solution