Symantec's latest Sate of Phishing Report revealed that all of the Chinese brands targeted during the month of May were from the e-commerce sector. This was consistent with the report for April, which also showed Chinese e-commerce sites being targeted for spoofing. India and Malaysia also made it to Symantec's top 15 entries for targeted brands by country. In both countries, spoofed sites were all from the banking sector. The security vendor said there were a total of 1,237 phishing sites hosted in 77 countries last month.
About 42 % of phishing URLs were generated by automated toolkits that aided the creation of phishing sites. Such toolkits allow lay persons without the necessary technical know-how, to carry out phishing attacks. 44 % of the phishing sites were hosted in the United States. Germany was in second place accounting for 5 %, while China was No. 3 with a 4 % share. San Diego took the honor of being the top host of phishing sites, followed by two Taiwanese cities--Taipei and Taichung. Symantec noted that phishing sites with IP domains are continuing to originate from more and more new cities every month. In the report, Symantec said the phishing sites connected with the attack targeting Facebook in May, were mostly based out of China and Latvia. According to the vendor, the domains hosting the phishing sites comprised country codes as part of what appeared to be haphazardly-generated names.
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