First hour of a phishing campaign the most effective

Half of the victims of phishing attacks respond within an hour of receipt of the scam message.

Calling this the ‘golden hour' of a phishing site's existence, Trusteer CTO Amit Klein noted that a typical phishing campaign takes at least one hour to be identified by IT security vendors. Within five hours, more than 80 per cent of the total pool of potential victims have responded, a figure that rises to 90 per cent after the first ten hours of a phishing attack.

He claimed that analysis of these figures shows that blocking a phishing site after five to ten hours is almost pointless. “A more effective model would prevent users from being directed to a phishing site or prevent them from entering their credentials if they do end up on a criminal site,” he said.

“As an industry, our goal should be to reduce the time it takes for institutions to detect they are being targeted by a phishing attack from hours to within minutes of the first customer attempting to access a rogue phishing page. We also need to establish really quick feeds into browsers and other security tools, so that phishing filters can be updated much more quickly than they are today. This is the only way to swiftly takedown phishing websites, protect customers and eliminate the golden hour.”

Talking to SC Magazine, Paul Wood, senior analyst at Symantec Hosted Services, said that phishing sites vary in how long they are online for, but like spam websites it is not long before they are taken offline, although spam sites do tend to last longer.

Talking about the capability of phishing websites being taken down quicker, Wood said that often a problem is that the site is hosted in another country.

See original article on scmagazineus.com