Phishing increased 62 percent in '09

The DarkReading site is carrying a story about brand-protection firm MarkMonitor's finding that phishing increased 62 percent in 2009 with 565,502 attacks in the year. MarkMonitor is based in San Francisco.

Other conclusions in MarkMonitor�s 2009 BrandJacking Index report:

-- The huge increase can probably be attributed to the use of botnets and the large amount of personal information that can be scraped from social network sources.
-- 2009 saw the all-time high average of 600 phishing attacks per organization
-- only 33 percent of victims were first-time targets.
-- Social networks suffered 11,240 attacks � two percent of the year�s total.
-- The U.S. hosted 44.7 percent of phishing attacks, up from 36.5 in 2008.

DarkReading story here.

Tom Kelchner