Cybercriminals Hack Hosting Providers and Use Their Systems for Mass Phishing Attacks

snoopy · Apr 27, 2013

April 26th, 2013, 20:59 GMT · By Eduard Kovacs
Cybercriminals Hack Hosting Providers and Use Their Systems for Mass Phishing Attacks

The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) has released its global phishing survey for the second half of 2012. It turns out that between July and December 2012, cybercriminals broke into the systems of hosting providers with unprecedented success. This allowed them to launch mass phishing attacks by abusing the targeted organizations’ systems.

By compromising a shared virtual server, the attackers can plant their malicious elements on every domain hosted on that server. Hundreds and even thousands of websites at a time can be hijacked in this manner.

In H2 2012, 47% of all phishing attacks involved shared virtual servers. “Breaking into hosting facilities is a high-yield activity for phishers,” said Rod Rasmussen, president and CTO of IID, and a co-author of the study.

“This activity is part of a larger trend – we also see criminals hacking into shared hosting and using those servers for other malicious activities, such as launching denial-of-service attacks, infecting the computers of the legitimate website visitors via exploit code, and creating botnets.”

The study also shows that the average uptime of phishing websites has been 26 hours and 13 minutes. As far as the domain names registered for phishing scams are concerned, the cybercriminals have abused a small number of registrars more prevalently than others. Eight of these companies are based in China.
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