The Anti-Phishing Working Group's report for December revealed that although the number of phishing e-mails fell between November and December last year, the number of fraudulent Web sites increased from 4630 to 7197, which is a new record.
Security companies say the increasing number of phishing Web sites can be attributed to the easy availability of phishing kits, which are tools that can be used by relatively non-technical people to create and manage multiple phishing sites.
According to Internet security specialists Websense, one of the most popular phishing kits is called Rock Phish Kit, which the company said was first seen last November.
Joel Camissar, country manager for Australia and New Zealand at Websense, told ZDNet Australia that the situation is similar to what happened when virus making kits started appearing a few years ago.
"The commercialisation of these phishing tools is what we saw in the anti-virus industry... when toolkits to create mass mailing worms started becoming increasingly popular. We are seeing the same parallel in the phishing world whereby these techniques are becoming mainstream," said Camissar.
