A key element in the fight against phishing is taking down the websites of criminals. How long does this take? It takes about 60 minutes for security vendors to identify a phishing campaign. Industry leading takedown vendors, such as FraudWatch International, claim average takedown times of 6 hours. How much damage can the bad guys do in six hours?
New research from Trusteer answers that question. 50% of the credentials which are stolen are stolen within the first 60 minutes. By the 7th hour (1 hour to discover, 6 hours to take down), the criminals have captured about 85% of the total credentials that will be stolen in the phishing attack. This table from Trusteer shows the speed, in hours, at which credentials are stolen.
Therefore, from the perspective of the target of a phishing attack, blocking a bad guy’s site after 5 hours is almost irrelevant.
What a consumer needs to do is protect online credentials. Part of the fight to protect online credentials is to avoid responding to phishing emails. Bad emails can be avoided by using a tool such as eMail ID, which identifies real emails from many email senders.
Don’t be fooled. Know it’s real. Use eMail ID.