Attackers have stepped up phishing attacks.

According to research by the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), phishing attacks on Chinese e-commerce and banking sites have increased recently, with the number of attacks increasing by over 44%.

The report's authors note that more than 70% of all domain names worldwide registered for phishing attacks belong to Chinese criminals.

The number of phishing attacks in the first half of 2011 increased from 12,000 (in the second half of 2010) to 17,000. During the first half of the year, Chinese cybercriminals registered 11,000 domains and 3,000 subdomains. In the second half of 2010, the number of such domains was 6,000 domains and 4,000 subdomains.

The study's authors note that, unlike other hackers, the Chinese do not use hacked domains, but register new domains onto which phishing pages are uploaded.

Over the past six months, Chinese cybercriminals launched 42,000 phishing attacks, each using a different domain name. These types of attacks accounted for 37% of all phishing attacks.

The average duration of a phishing attack compared to 2010 decreased in 2011 from 73 to 54 hours.

In the first half of 2011, at least 112,000 unique phishing attacks were carried out globally across 200 top-level domains. This is more than in 2010, but less than in 2009, when 126,000 attacks were recorded.

The 2011 attacks used 79,000 unique domain names. This is a significant increase compared to 2007. Moreover, 2,900 attacks were detected on 2,300 IP addresses, not domain names.

Moreover, almost 93% of the domains used to organize phishing attacks used just four top-level domains - TK, .INFO, .COM, and .NET.