Success Rate Of Phishing Attacks Still Not Low

Phishers are being successful in 14 percent of their attacks. That comes to be higher than the preceding estimates by those who monitor network security, according to a study by University of Indiana. PCworld reported this on April 26, 2007.

EBay being a popular target of scammers, the School of Informatics at the university pretended to make real phishing attacks on the site's customers. These simulated attacks were launched under a research on "Designing Ethical phishing Experiments: A Study of (ROT13) ronl query features".

EBay customers continue to become victims of phishing attacks for scams like hacking, premium services fraud and spam-based confidence schemes. In addition, crooks find new ways to trick and victimize customers.

Crooks also widely launch credit and debit card fraud, check fraud and investment fraud all of which are common to shopping sites such as eBay. They steal credit and debit card details over the Internet by fairly less sophisticated methods than required to crack encrypted transmissions. Crooks conduct credit card frauds from the customer call center where they pay cash to low paid employees to supply them customer information.

The researchers although found a large number of successful phishing attacks, but restrained from disclosing the number of victims. All that they said was the Gartner report's finding of 3 percent of successful targets on American adults might not fully encompass users who are tricked but won't admit.

The researchers' aim was to find out the success rates of various types of phishing assaults not only those that currently exist but also those that do not occur, said Markus Jacobsson, associate professor of informatics at Indiana University and an associate director of Center for Applied CyberSecurity Research of the school. PCworld published the two persons' joint statement on April 26, 2007.

The research also dealt with spear phishing in which e-mail appear to come from a friend or an expected sender. These messages try to extract personal information like eBay username, making the message appear legitimate.

A lot of vendors are initiating to tackle the phishing issue with various types of phishing Filters.

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» SPAMfighter News - 04-05-2007

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