eBay and Paypal are the top phishing targets of 2005, says Netcraft. They make up 62% of all phishing URLs submitted to Netcraft.


eBay and Paypal are the top phishing targets of 2005, says Netcraft. They make up 62% of all phishing URLs submitted to Netcraft.

More than 13,000 of these phishing sites used URLs that included “paypal” or “eBay”, as a subdirectory or file name. The domains included misspellings, substitution of numbers for letters or used hyphenated phrases or third level domains, ex: paypal.mysite.com.

Many of the URLs submitted were spoofs submitted from free sites and cracked computers, through a botnet. The spoofs sites bore identical structures and file titles.

Almost 4,700 of these phishing URLs contained the string “webscr”, which copied paypal’s cgi script. Other URLs included “ebayISAPI”, which also appears in genuine eBay searches.

“eBay and Paypal have more than 68 million active users between them, all of whom use e-mail, meaning bulk phishing e-mails will get a higher percentage of “hits” (recipients with accounts at the targeted institution) for eBay properties than other potential financial targets.” [Source]

Netcraft analyzed 41,047 URLs and saw the following trends:

a) 13,716 phishing URLs were hosted on raw IP addresses.
b) 8,785 phishing URLs contained “˜%’ (a hidden directory on the web server).
c) 2,104 specified a different port number (other than port 80).
d) 8 used cross-site scripting.
e) 6 were hosted on FTP servers.

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