Phishing Landscape 2022: An Annual Study of the Scope and Distribution of Phishing

The study, which analyzes over 3 million phishing reports representing over 1.1 million phishing attacks, shows that phishing increased by 61% over the period 1 May 2021 through 30 April 2022.

Phishing continues to pose a significant threat to millions of Internet users. Among the major findings in the study, Interisle reports that:

• Phishers targeted over 2000 businesses and organizations during the 1 May 2021 to 30 April 2022 period. The majority of phishing attacks targeted just ten brands.

• A small number of registrars dominate malicious domain registration in some TLDs. In four TLDs, more than 80% of the malicious domains were registered through just one registrar.

• Phishing attacks are disproportionately concentrated in new gTLDs.While the new TLDs' market share decreased during our yearly reporting period, phishing among the new TLDs has increased.

• Phishers deliberately registered 69% of all domains—and 92% of new gTLD domains—on which phishing occurred. 58% of all reported phishing attacks were hosted on these maliciously registered phishing domains.

• Cryptocurrency phishing rose 257%. Nearly 80% of the gTLD domains reported for phishing were maliciously registered. Wallets were the most targeted brands.

Comments can be submitted to criminaldomainabuse@interisle.net.

The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this report are the product of independent work conducted by Interisle Consulting Group, without direction or other influence from any outside party, including parties that may have provided funding to support the work.