On December 5, 2012, APAC Annual Working Meeting 2012 was held in Beijing, over 200 represents of APAC members, Internet experts and legal experts from China Academy of Sciences (CAS), Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Ministry of Public Security, National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center of China, etc, Mr. Foy Shiver, Vice President of APWG (Anti-Phishing Work Group), also participated in the Annual Meeting for the first time upon invitation. 

At the Meeting, CNNIC where APAC Secretariat is located released APAC Work Report 2012. According to the Report, APAC has confirmed and handled 100,402 phishing websites by November 20, 2012, including 24,535 handled during Jan-Nov, 2012, decreased by 33% compared with the same period in 2011. It’s pointed out in the Report phishing websites are mainly distributed in three sectors, i.e. payment & transaction, finance & securities, media & diffusion, etc, covering 94.61% of the total number. The data indicate phishing websites are concentrated in e-business sector, covering over 60% of the phishing websites handled. 

Since the establishment of APAC in July 2008, APAC members have increased from less than 40 to 492 in 2012; the phishing websites pushed by relying on APAC members cover 81.75% of the total number of phishing websites reported, and APAC members play a significant role in combating phishing websites. 

Through over four years of efforts from various parties, the rapid phishing website handling mechanism has been gradually improved. Since 2012, APAC carried out the second testing and screening of the reported phishing data to screen out the invalid phishing websites so as to further optimize the handling efficiency. In addition, APAC also actively attempts multiple detecting methods such as “heuristic feature detection”, “mode identification”, etc to further improve the handling efficiency and expand the scope of acceptation. According to the Report, the scope of phishing websites that APAC may accept increased by a fold compared that in the previous year, and the scope for reporting expanded from websites under .cn domain names to those under t more than 80 top level domain names such as .com, .net, .org, .info., etc. 

Phishing websites have become a world-wide threat to network security and has become an urgent problem that need to be resolved in the global Internet industry. At this meeting, we invited the participation of Mr. Foy Shiver, Vice President of APWG, for the first time, and the attendees will share the information about phishing websites and network security in the world and Asia Pacific Region and as well as experiences and technology of phishing website treatment abroad.