Phishing Attacks Grew Three Times in Romania

As per a news report released by the internet security service provider BitDefender, during the 2nd week of October 2008, it was estimated that the total number of phishers' attacks in Romania increased three times during the eight months from January to August 2008 over those of the entire 2007. This places Romania in the fifth place on the list of countries having the largest number of cloned bank sites worldwide, as reported by Financiarul on October 24, 2008.

Security researchers and analysts at BitDefender said that while the company estimated the US bank customers lost a sum of $3.2 Billion during 2007 due to phishing assaults, there is currently no information of similar losses with the Romanian bank account attacks in 2008.

Further, Head of BitDefender's anti-spam Research, Vlad Valceanu, stated that the data stolen from the hacked accounts were sold in the underground market at extremely cheap rates. These ranged from 50 cents to 100 dollars, as reported by Financiarul on October 24, 2008.

In addition to this, there are reports that people are increasingly indulging in phishing attacks to make quick money. However, it brings to mind the screwing of a gang of phishers in May this year (2008). The police caught 38 phishers from Romania and the US who were behind a number of phishing attacks targeting accountholders with financial institutions such as Citibank, Comerica Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Capital One among others.

Meantime, another security representative from BitDefender said that phishers' attacks have also undergone evolution from the phishing e-mails with grammatical errors to those containing solid texts, and encoded pages that have been cloned to bypass content-based filters. Also, the modern phishing e-mails are delivered in the form of HTML folders instead of URL.

Moreover, as per a study conducted by S&T Romania recently, in 60% of the registered frauds with the company, employees of the organization are involved. The study also notes that frauds are responsible for 5% of companies' lost turnover while more than 50% of them occur accidentally.

Related article: Phishing With A Redirector Code

» SPAMfighter News - 11/5/2008