APAC: 4,000 Fake “Taobao” Websites Closed By July 2010

The Anti-Phishing Alliance of China has announced that by the end of July 2010, the alliance had received 19,817 reports related to phishing websites, and e-commerce websites were the most imitated ones.

According to APAC, the number of phishing website reports in the first seven months of 2010 was more than double compared with the entire year of 2009. Taobao.com, Tencent’s qq.com, and the website of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China were the three websites that were most imitated by phishing websites, accounting for over 90% of the total reports. In addition, more than 4,000 fake “Taobao” websites were found and closed during the period.

The China Internet information security report published by APAC in March 2010 showed that over 90% Chinese netizens encountered phishing websites mainly via emails and instant messaging in 2009. Those phishing websites not only led to Chinese netizens’ mistrust in the Internet, but also hindered the healthy development of the Internet in China.

In regards to the handling of phishing websites, APAC said that after receiving reports, the alliance will submit these websites to professional government departments for analysis. Once these websites are identified as phishing websites, the alliance will inform their domain name registration service providers via emails and ask them to stop the DNS operations. If the registrants of these websites have any doubt in the decision, they can appeal to the secretariat of APAC.

If these phishing websites are engaged in fraud, the related criminal reports will be transferred to the public security organizations for handling.