A working group on anti-phishing was formed late last year, and now publishes the first attempts (that I have seen) at hard statiscs on the epidemic in their monthly Phishing Attack Trends Report on the epidemic.
The report has one salient number: 176 unique phishing attacks in January, up from 116 the previous month. Another document listed on that site (FTC's National and State Trends in Fraud and Identity Theft) showed a figure of $200 million lost in Internet related fraud over the year 2003.
Worth a read, if looking for hard info on phishing. As the WG has just been formed, and stats only go back a few months, it's too early to tell whether this is the collection ramping up, or we are in the middle of an explosion. The FTC's $200m doesn't drill down any further, so phishing will be some small percentage of that number.
(I'm not sure why the WG publishes in PDF, instead of HTML. It seems that they are reaching to bureaucrats and marketeers rather than techies, which is a worrying sign.)
Posted by iang at March 5, 2004 12:28 PM | TrackBack