IID Highlights 12% Year-On-Year Surge in Phishing Attacks

Lately, IID (Internet Identity), a technology and services provider that support organizations in safeguarding Internet presence, released its e-Crime Trends Report for Q1-2011. According to the report, phishing attacks during the first quarter of 2011 considerably augmented compared to the first quarter of 2010. The report reveals a 12% surge in the overall phishing scams during January 2011- March 2011, over the same period in 2010.

IID anticipates this augmented phishing activity and latest Internet security violations to result into more spear phishing attacks, a complex form of e-mail scam targeting a particular individual or organization.

Commenting on the matter, Rod Rasmussen, IID President and CTO, stated that, as noticed with the latest attacks against Sony's PlayStation Network and Epsilon, cybercrooks now possess secret information regarding several customers to exploit in the highly sophisticated phishing campaigns, as reported by MarketWire on May 10, 2011. He further added that, the only concern is that with all of this private information, cybercrooks possess all they require to persuade people into sharing their extremely sensitive and worth private and confidential information.

Remarkably, besides phishing activities during the first quarter of 2011, the latest report by IID talks about the shutdown operation of the Rustock botnet, which supposedly was accountable for a considerable portion -- probably as much as one-third -- of the total spam e-mail messages since 2008.

The report reveals that, on March 16 (2011), various researchers noticed a remarkable decline in Rustock activity, and during the time span of the consequent 2 days, it was highlighted that Microsoft, Fireye, McAfee, and other security researchers, in collaboration with the US Federal law enforcement carried out the shutdown of the Rustock botnet in an operation called "b1079".

Further, besides phishing and botnet shutdowns the IID report sheds light on the take down of leading cybercrime-hosting provider across the globe, VolgaHost during January 2011. The Russian provider, which had been positioned number one "Bad Host" by the HostExploit for the fourth quarter of 2010, offered bulletproof hosting to cybercrooks running command and control servers for botnets. Immediately after HostExploit named VolgaHost the most terrible offender in their report, the provider was depowered by its upstream provider, RUNNet. ru10. However, by the end of Q-1, Volgahost. ru appeared to be open again for business, the report highlighted.

Related article: ID Theft Victims Will Double In Next Four Years

» SPAMfighter News - 5/17/2011