According to the report, the number of phishing emails developed using automated toolkits rose by an amazing 50.33%, compared to January.
Interestingly, the report also reveals that spam made up 80.65% of all messages sent over the internet during February.
Delving into Symantec's analysis reveals that '419' advance fee fraud emails also rose by 5% during the month, whilst web hosting services accounted for 13% of all phishing – an increase of almost 39% from the previous month.
The number of non-English phishing sites, meanwhile, saw a significant increase by 76.51%. Among non-English phishing sites, Portuguese, French, and Spanish were the highest ranked during February
The report also highlights a mass phish on cred card services brands using fake SSL credentials during the month.
According to Symantec, phishing websites that use SSL are uncommon and typically seen in very small numbers. To create a phishing site that uses SSL, the phisher would either have to create a fake SSL certificate or attack a legitimate certificate to attain encryption for the site.
In both cases, the firm says it has observed that phishing sites using SSL are less frequent. In this particular attack, there were over a hundred phishing URLs that used a fake SSL certificate.
"This was achieved by hosting the phishing site on one single IP address which resolved to several domain names. That is, although there were abundant URLs in the attack, they all resolved to a single IP address and contained the same webpage", says the report.
"The SSL certificate was an expired one, with its issue date of the year 2006 and an expiration date of 2007", it adds, noting that the phisher's primary motive behind creating an encrypted phishing site is to help the site appear authentic and to convince users that the site is safe.