The rate at which identity theft e-mails hit consumers is beginning to slow, a study published on Wednesday suggests.

The Anti-Phishing Working Group found that 13,141 new phishing e-mails were reported to the organization in February, an increase of just 2 percent compared with January results. The number of phishing Web sites supporting these attacks only rose by 1.8 percent–from 2,578 to 2,625–over the same period, the APWG said.

The APWG said that the monthly growth rate of phishing attacks since July 2004 is 26 percent. However, since the group’s results depend on the number of people that report phishing scams to its Web site, the increase in reported scams could simply be a result of growing awareness of the APWG and its actions. It’s not clear why there was such a small rise in reported phishing scams between January and February 2005.

The Wednesday report confirmed that scammers have started using a new practice called pharming, a fraud technique that hijacks authentic domain names and secretly redirects users to fraudulent Web sites.

Source: News.com