Life cycle statistics may be the most surprising as mentioned above, phishing pages tend to vanish quickly. What Kaspersky learned about phishing websitesĪ lot of information can be gleaned from those few publicly available statistics about a page, and Kaspersky has done just that with the phishing data it investigated. Those criteria allowed Kaspersky to build an analysis method that classified pages as having different content, a change in phishing target or no change.
“Over a thirty-day period from the moment a “phishing” verdict was assigned to a page, the analysis program checked each link every two hours and saved the response code issued by the server as well as the text of the retrieved HTML page,” Kaspersky said.īased on the information it gathered over that 30-day period, Kaspersky decided to focus on the title of the page, its size and its MD5 hash (which changes when any edit is made to a website).
Kaspersky pulled a total of 5,310 links identified as bad by its anti-phishing engine, and tracked those pages over the course of 30 days. SEE: Google Chrome: Security and UI tips you need to know (TechRepublic Premium) The fear and paranoia that phishing can evoke may only be made worse by this news, but have faith: Kaspersky said that it believes its data “could be used to improve mechanisms for re-scanning pages which have ended up in anti-phishing databases, to determine the response time to new cases of phishing, and for other purposes,” all of which could make katching, tracking and killing phishing pages and their operators easier. A quarter of those are dead within 13 hours, and half last no more than 94 hours, or just under 4 days. Kaspersky’s in-depth analysis of phishing websites found that nearly three quarters of all phishing pages stop showing signs of activity within 30 days.
The 10 best antivirus products you should consider for your businessĨ enterprise password managers and the companies that will love themĮnd user data backup policy (TechRepublic Premium) How Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will affect your cybersecurity Research from cybersecurity firm Kaspersky has found that most phishing websites vanish or go inactive within days, giving us yet another reason to fear phishing: It’s fly-by-night, hard to track and happens in a flash. Image: Vladimir Obradovic, Getty Images/iStockphoto Research from Kaspersky finds that a quarter of phishing sites are gone within 13 hours - how in the world can we catch and stop cyber criminals that move so quickly? Study: Most phishing pages are abandoned or disappear in a matter of days