Attacks Against Mobile Subscribers Nearly Doubling From Q3 to Q4 as Vishing Surges
CAMBRIDGE, MA / ACCESSWIRE / May 9, 2023 / The APWG’s new Phishing Activity Trends Report reveals that 2022 was another record-shattering year for phishing, with the APWG logging more than 4.7 million phishing sites. Since the beginning of 2019, the number of phishing attacks has accelerated, growing at 150 percent per year.
APWG
In the fourth quarter of 2022, APWG observed 1,350,037 total phishing attacks. This is more than in the third quarter of 2022 when APWG recorded 1,270,883 total phishing attacks, which was a new record at the time and the worst quarter for phishing that APWG has ever observed. APWG recorded 4,744,699 phishing attacks in 2022 – up from 2,847,773 in 2021, 1,845,814 in 2020, and 779,200 in 2019.
APWG Secretary General Peter Cassidy, commenting on the quarter’s findings in the context of recent advances of LLM AI systems entering the field, said, “The dawn of AICrime is upon us, even before we’ve gotten a grip on conventional phishing. Today, we face robot felons who learn on the job, 24 hours a day, on behalf of their felonious masters. The most forgiving days of our cybercrime epoch may well have passed.”
In the fourth quarter of 2022, APWG founding member OpSec Security found that phishing attacks against the financial sector, which includes banks, remained the largest set of attacks, accounting for 27.7 percent of all phishing. Phishing against cryptocurrency targets – such as cryptocurrency exchanges and wallet providers – fell from 4.5 percent in Q2 to 2.0 percent in Q3 and 2.3 percent in Q4, as the crypto market continues to be roiled by falling values.
Matthew Harris, Senior Product Manager, Fraud at OpSec Security, noted, “The logistics and shipping industry saw a large fraud volume increase, specifically because of more attacks against the U.S. Postal Service. We also tracked a ..
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