The non-profit Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) publically released its report for Q4 of 2018. The main finding is a steady downtrend in phishing attacks. Between October and December 2018, APWG detected 138,328 infringements, down from 151,014 in Q3 and almost half the number in Q1 when it tallied 263,538.
Despite the apprehensions of many specialists, the statistics strongly suggest that Whois data cloaking has not accelerated phishing activity in any way. There was concern that the enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which, among other, prohibits the disclosure of domain name registrants’ data in Whois, would make cybercriminals feel more at ease, ultimately expanding illegal domain activities, including phishing attacks. According to the new study, not only did phishing not soar but actually dropped significantly instead. APWG experts, however, caution against excessive optimism over the news since the study results might be due not only to a reduction in the number of attacks but also to a decline in the efficiency of detection tools. Phishing schemes have been getting increasingly sophisticated, employing multiple automatic redirects, which seriously hampers the identification of original phishing domains.
The “leader” in the number of phishing domains remains gTLD .COM. APWG found that in Q4 of 2018, it accounted for about 47 percent of all the attacked domain names. Other major national domains the report lists in this regard are Brazil’s .BR and Great Britain’s .UK. As for the new generic top-level domains, only two of them − .XYZ and .ONLINE – were among the top twenty most targeted in phishing attacks.
