Phishing Assaults Still Developing And Proliferating: RSA

According to RSA the security company in its "December 2010 Online Fraud Report," cyber-criminals are still popularly using phishing assaults to steal the online banking credentials of American consumers via getting them to reveal their passwords and logins.

States the report that during November 2010, the security company spotted 16,813 global phishing assaults that were 5% more than those reported during October 2010.

However, the latest phishing threat landscape has a relatively fresh twist. In this, some phishing assaults simultaneously aimed against multiple organizations' brands via just one attack, RSA outlines in its new report. The company also notes that there was a widespread use of easy-to-use toolkits for creating phishing software that were available for black. Cutimes.com reported this on January 10, 2011.

A point of interest according to the report is that phishing threats presently appear nearly trivial with so much discussion about trojans and malware.

But, simply since phishing is a traditional ruse, which end-users manage towards recognizing more easily, and so allow it to be less effective sometimes, one shouldn't mistake cyber-criminals as not using it as their top preference even now. For, they're still developing their phishing toolkits' utility, while employing different social engineering tactics for deceiving Internet users into getting victimized with their scams. Furthermore, given that phishing attacks are increasing in number every month, RSA notes that the scams appear to be still working.

One more scam, which too is apparently quite widespread, is phishing or spoofed e-mails, which pretend to be customer satisfaction questionnaires that prominent consumer brands distribute for surveys.

Additionally, as per the results of the report, during October-November 2010, 10% of the total assaults against financial institutions targeted U.S credit unions. Simultaneously, 70% of the assaults targeted nationwide banks, while the remaining targeted regional banks, RSA states.

Besides, the USA is still the greatest host for phishing assaults accounting for a 6% rise in excess of the number during October 2010, while in Canada; the number has declined 5%. Further, the remaining hosting countries continued to be exactly the same during November 2010 except for Hong Kong that substituted Hungary at No.1.

Related article: Phishing With A Redirector Code

» SPAMfighter News - 1/20/2011