Phishing, an American pastime

A recent report by the Anti-Phishing Working Group — at www.antiphishing.org — reports the United States has the largest number of Web sites used in phishing scams. Phishing is the attempt to gain a person’s personal or financial information by pretending to be a legitimate company.

During June this year, about 32 percent of attempted phishing attacks were based in the United States. The next four countries, in providing or hosting phishing Web sites were Korea (10 percent), Poland (6.8 percent), Russia (6.6 percent) and Bangladesh (4 percent).

About 95 percent of 288,000 attempted phishing messages reported in June pretended to be from financial services firms. Government and miscellaneous names were second with 2.7 percent. And in general, the number of phishing reports increases monthly, the agency said.