Growing Internet Fraud Reduces ‘E-Crime Education’ Success

E-crime education to spread awareness about phishing hazards and other Internet fraud among users has not been successful, according to a prominent security expert.

Speaking at the annual-crime summit in London, European director of Symantec's Security Practice, William Beer told delegates that all great efforts to build e-commerce would be in danger if fraud over the Net continued to escalate.

He further said that phishing attacks were getting more sophisticated and they increasingly targeted users' personal details via authentic-appearing e-mails. phishing attacks were also growing in variety such as SMS phishing and voice phishing. This calls for updating the education message.

While delivering the opening keynote address, Joseph Sullivan of PayPal exclaimed that phishing was a larger threat to online commerce and safety of the Internet. He argued it was necessary to tighten up domain registrar of site proprietors so that it is easy to catch phishers.

The latest Internet Security Threat report from security firm Symantec Corp. noted that the increased data theft, and data slippage governed the current threat on Internet environment. Malicious code designed to access confidential information to turn them into fraud activity also adds to Internet threat.

Beer argued that the industry should now ponder on its communication strategies and think what attacks would appear next. He said e-mail, a cost and time effective mode of legitimate consumer communication would be at risk of failing in being recognized of these qualities, if phishing continued.

Sharon Lemon, head of E-crime Unit at Soca admitted that there was a rise in the sophistication level of phishing attacks and users in U.K. were making the most luring victims.

The Symantec report placed U.S. as the biggest originator of malicious activity - 31% while China followed second with 10% and Germany came next with 7%.

Beer suggested targeting the education message differently on the basis of the age of users. But Joseph Sullivan contended that education will not help stop Internet fraud as the attacks were too clever now. Mikko Hypponen of web security firm, F-Secure put in that instead of users, operating system makers and security vendors should be responsible for security.

Related article: Growing Number of Online Attacks Creating Trouble for Experts

» SPAMfighter News - 4/3/2007