Phishing Becomes More Prevalent

Many anti-virus companies have reclassified the growing phishing techniques as malware instead of spam, a new research report says.

Security software firm SoftScan found that in April 2007 there was growth in the volume of web traffic detected to be malware. This was basically because most messages were phishing e-mails rather than spam mails.

Of the total e-mails that SoftScan scanned during April, about 89% were spam and 1.92% contained viruses. In the previous month i.e., in March SoftScan scanned to find just 0.6% e-mails carrying viruses. The increase in April has been because of the change in the method of identifying phishing e-mails. There were similar statistics in August 2006.

Since September 2006, there was an increasing trend in the size of individual spam mails. They increased from around 6.62 KB to 11.76 KB on average. Although the size was still small, but business houses received bulks of spam.

Since anti-virus companies are increasingly identifying phishing e-mails as malware and not spam it indicates the increase in threat to end-users, says Diego d'Ambra, chief technology officer of SoftScan in a press release. SourceWire published the press release on May 2, 2007.

Diego d'Ambra further said in the press release that one and a half years ago Internet users regarded phishing e-mails as a nuisance instead of a large-scale danger and malware vendors typically named them spam mails. However, with increased sophistication in phishing attacks that successfully find victims, the overall phishing threat has become highly prevalent.

Very recently in the end week of April, a lot many attackers craftily used the Google Adwords to launch phishing malware via search engine hits. While Google has now separated the problem it is also taking action to ensure that hackers are not able to exploit the vulnerability again.

The April 2007 list of top ten virus families that were 95.57% phishing malware included Stration with 1.02%; Netsky -0.96%; Dropper -0.78% and Mytob -0.44%.

The figures for top five virus families in March 2007 were phishing -92.09%; Netsky -3.38%; Mytob -1.27%; Bagle -0.86%; and Stration -0.56%, according to anti-malware company SoftScan's release.

Related article: Phishing With A Redirector Code

» SPAMfighter News - 5/9/2007