If you were hoping for recession-proof work, don’t take this as a career tip — but the underground malware trade exploded in 2008, with some encouraging signs for victims amid the chaos.

A quarterly analysis by the anti-phishing working group found an astonishing surge in phishing-related crimeware: 9,529 URLs spreading phishing tools by the end of June, a 258% jump from the same period a year earlier.

Applications that power those scam sites also peaked — 442 distinct apps in May — driven in part by a wave of SQL-injection code that dominated much of the year.

Rather than casting a wider net, attackers are getting more efficient. The number of different brands targeted kept rising, while the count of brand–domain pairs (the real URL versus the fake one) actually fell — a sign that phishers are refining their tricks and need fewer lures to catch victims.

In total, 294 brands were reported hijacked during the quarter, another high-water mark.

AWPG chair Dave Jevans ties some of this activity to the broader economic climate, noting that scammers have crafted finance-themed lures that exploit consumer fears about troubled institutions.

“As the economy degrades, we are seeing a continual increase in malicious and criminal activity on the internet,” he wrote, and phishing volumes rose about 13% over the quarter.

But Jevans’ larger alarm is the rapid growth of crimeware itself and the web infrastructure that distributes it — levels he hadn’t seen in the group’s five-year tracking history.

There is a silver lining for inboxes, however. After the takedown of the McColo hosting provider briefly disrupted major botnets, researchers expected spam to rebound quickly as botnets reconstituted.

Four weeks on, mail scanners were still enjoying lower-than-previous spam loads. Matt Sergeant of MessageLabs (now part of Symantec) reports that while some botnets like Cutwail and Mega-D have increased output as operators shift traffic, overall volumes have not returned to the pre-McColo peak.

In short: crimeware and targeted phishing are surging and getting smarter, but the disruption of key botnet infrastructure has bought defenders a meaningful — if fragile — respite.

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