Throughout the second half of 2009, the amount of phishing messages sent by cybercriminals looking to trick consumers into revealing sensitive personal data has remained constant, a recent survey reveals.

According to the same research, carried out by Romanian provider of anti-malware security solutions BitDefender, the same interval has seen a shift in the fraudsters’ focus. The latter have thus switched their attention to institutions that could bring them the most profit in the shortest timeframe.

Primary phishing targets include PayPal, Visa and eBay, followed by HSBC, American Express and Abbey Bank. Ally Bank and Bank of America rank last with a little over one percent of the total amount of phishing messages. These messages mostly target English-speaking computer users who are using the services of at least one of the institutions previously mentioned.

The same survey reveals that in the interval between July and December 2009, an increasing number of e-threats have targeted social networking platforms. According to BitDefender, while spam and phishing have summed up around 80 percent of e-threats related to social networks, worms exploiting large platforms have rapidly escalated.

An example would be Koobface worm, classified as “one of the most active and destructive e-threats affecting social networking platforms”. The Koobface worm disabled some of the commercially-available antivirus utilities and exports sensitive user data (such as online banking credentials and not only) from infected computers to a remote location.