Cybercriminals will try everything they can to lure somebody into visiting a phishing website, but the good news is that those websites don’t tend to be available for all that long.

Research conducted by Kaspersky between 19th July and 2nd August 2021 found that of 5 307 phishing pages, 1 784 stopped working after the first day of monitoring. As time marches on these websites are taken down quickly and, within 94 hours, half of the phishing pages were gone.

These pages aren’t being taken down by the creators though and we might have administrators to thank for the short-lived nature of phishing websites.

“The lifetime of a phishing page depends on the moment it becomes visible to the site administrators and is removed by them. Even if phishers have deployed their own server on the purchased domain and are suspected of fraudulent activity, the registrars may deprive the phishers of the right to host the data on it,” writes Kaspersky.

The cybersecurity firm goes on to explain that every hour a phishing website is online, it tends to appear on more anti-phishing databases and as such, users can be warned before visiting the website.

However, many more cybercriminals do their utmost to avoid being taken down and as such will pivot their operation. This can include impersonating a new brand or obfuscating the code of the website so that anti-phishing engines can’t detect them. One example of this that Kaspersky highlights is the use of PUBG giveaways which phishing sites use as a lure.

“Such research is not only useful for updating our databases, but it can also be used to improve incident response. For example, if an organisation is undergoing a spam attack with fraudulent links, it’s important to repel it in the first hours, as it’s the most beneficial time for phishers’ activity,” says Egor Bubnov, a security researcher at Kaspersky.

“In turn, it is important for users to remember that when they receive a link and have doubts about the legitimacy of the site, we recommend they wait for a few hours. During that time, not only will the likelihood of getting the link in the anti-phishing databases increase, but the phishing page itself can stop its activity,” adds Bubnov.

While that is good advice, we recommend avoiding phishing websites altogether and not clicking links that seem suspicious. Waiting is all good and well but you may want to scrutinise the URL of the link for spelling errors. These spelling errors are subtle but they will give away the ghost.

Furthermore, reporting phishing websites may help to bring them offline

Stay safe out their folks, 2022 is going bring with it new threats and vigilance is incredibly important.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]