Posted by Virus Bulletin on Nov 7, 2006
PhishTank, Sophos stats put US at top of lists.
Statistics released by anti-phishing community project PhishTank, launched early last month, have put the US far ahead of the field in phishing sites, with 24% of sites discovered worldwide hosted there. Sophos' quarterly 'Dirty Dozen' list of top spamming countries also puts the US at the top of the table, with 21.6% of spam being sent from machines in the States.
PhishTank's first month of activity has seen over 7,000 sites submitted to their system for checking, with over half confirmed as phishing sites under a voting system which recorded 93,531 votes from the 2,400-strong online community, with an average of just 18.1 minutes taken to verify a submitted URL. The US had a heavy lead in sites during the month, with South Korea in second place, hosting 14% of sites, India third with 8% and China fourth with 6%. Full details of the month's activity are here.
NetCraft's 'Phishiest Countries' stats, which measure phishiness based on the number of phishing sites as a percentage of total sites hosted in a country, currently places Comoros, a tiny island group in the Indian Ocean, at the top of the league with only 7 known sites but, somewhat bizarrely, 10 phishing sites. The US, with large numbers of legitimate sites to outweigh the phishing, doesn't even make the top 50 chart.
In the spam-watching world, Sophos latest 'Dirty Dozen', covering July-September, places the US ahead of China, source of 13.4% of spam seen by their labs, and France and South Korea, tied in third place at 6.3%. When measured by continent, however, Asia and Europe are way ahead, with 34.1% and 31.9% respectively, compared to North America's 24.2%.
Spamhaus also place the US at the top of the their 'Spam Haven' charts, with over 2000 'known spam issues' located in America, while China (355), Japan (254) and Russia (224) lag way behind. Messagelabs, in their October report, place the US second in their table of spam targets, overtaking Ireland, while Isreal lead the field with 84.4% of emails received there being spam. They also report slight falls in phishing and viruses, despite a sizeable rise in spam.
Posted on 07 November 2006 by Virus Bulletin
