{"id":10843,"date":"2019-05-20T17:02:44","date_gmt":"2019-05-20T21:02:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thesslstore.com\/blog\/?p=10843"},"modified":"2023-04-07T14:00:47","modified_gmt":"2023-04-07T18:00:47","slug":"58-of-phishing-websites-now-use-https","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thesslstore.com\/blog\/58-of-phishing-websites-now-use-https\/","title":{"rendered":"58% of Phishing Websites Now Use HTTPS"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Phishing saw a sharp increase in Q1 2019\u2026 again.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Stop me if you\u2019ve heard this one before: incidence of\nphishing have increased since last quarter. Again. Just like the quarter before\nthat. And the quarter before that. Dating all the way back to the days of the\nearly internet when a down-on-his-luck Nigerian prince first sought financial\nrelief from the well-to-do denizens of AOL and Hotmail. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nowadays phishing has evolved. Substantially. These are no longer shot-in-the-dark style emails that somehow manage to elude your spam folder. These are now highly-tailored feats of social engineering that target specific industries, companies and individuals. Phishing, the simple act of ripping someone off with a grammatically questionable email has grown up into CEO fraud, whaling, spearphishing, etc. It\u2019s become the most common delivery mechanism for malware and other cyber attacks. 91% of cyber attacks now start with a phishing email<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In many ways phishing is like a gateway hack. It starts off as\njust a few innocent spearphishing emails among friends, but before you know it,\nyou\u2019re huddled over a laptop in an Eastern European internet caf\u00e9 trying to\nscrape together enough of a botnet to launch one more DDoS\u2026 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026anyway, according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) phishing is up again in Q1 2019<\/a> and nearly 60% of the phishing websites the study turned up were using SSL\/TLS \u2013 sporting the green HTTPS padlock<\/a>. So, today we\u2019re going to take a look at the study, break down some of the trends and offer a little insight on shoring up those defenses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s hash it out.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n<\/span><\/span>\n\n\n

Phishing in Q1 2019: The big takeaways<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The APWG is a non-profit industry association that was founded in 2003. Its membership comprises over 2,000 organizations across the world. It publishes quarterly reports on phishing that look at the industries targeted, total number of phishing emails received and how many new phishing websites have been created over the last three months. Keep in mind, these are not global figures – this only pertains to the cases and campaigns that were reported to the APWG.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Q1 of 2019, the APWG came away with three major takeaways (actually, four \u2013 we just aren\u2019t going to focus on the case study in Brazil). We\u2019ll mention them here really quickly and then drill down into the HTTPS phishing issue – given that it’s especially relevant to us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Key takeaways:<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Most<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n