Security News > 2021 > December > Study: Most phishing pages are abandoned or disappear in a matter of days
Kaspersky's in-depth analysis of phishing websites found that nearly three quarters of all phishing pages stop showing signs of activity within 30 days.
The fear and paranoia that phishing can evoke may only be made worse by this news, but have faith: Kaspersky said that it believes its data "Could be used to improve mechanisms for re-scanning pages which have ended up in anti-phishing databases, to determine the response time to new cases of phishing, and for other purposes," all of which could make katching, tracking and killing phishing pages and their operators easier.
In addition to learning that phishing pages are short lived, the study also found that phishing pages almost always remain unchanged throughout their active period.
Not once did a phishing website change its target in the course of Kaspersky's study, which it attributed to the fact that many phishing websites rely on spoofed domain names made to closely mimic legitimate websites.
Kasperksy breaks its data down even further, grouping pages by four formal criteria: Date of domain creation, top level domain, location of the phishing page on the website's directory, and domain level where the page is located.
Without being able to put Kaspersky's phishing site identification methodology into practice at a large scale, it only serves to remind us once again that phishing is real, it's serious, and it's incredibly tricky to pin down.