The Spamtraps used by Avira to collect spam, phishing and malware from Internet, recorded some interesting data which show us a change in the trends for the end of this year.

As can be seen in the graphics below, there is a big increase in the levels of Phishing and a decrease in the level of Malware in the last 3 months. The system which records these statistics was started and filled with data at the end of September and this is why we can see such a big increase in the malware URLs.

Phishing on the rise, malware down

But, from that point on, the number of phishing URLs increased constantly until reaching 45226 unique URLs (38.3%) at the end of November, tendency is to grow even further.

The Malware URLs sum to a 72833 unique URLs, representing a 61.7% of the total entries.

The amount of phishing URLs is taking up a much bigger part in the meantime.

The exact distribution of Phishing and Malware can be seen in the graphic below, from September 2008 until the end of November 2008 (date of writing this article). The level of Phishing is still growing constantly from October to November.

Development of the amount of phishing URLs in the past three months

Sorin Mustaca
Manager International Software Development