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More Phishing, Less Viruses

Fortinet revealed in its report for April 2007 that BankFraud.E and Phishbank.BGU comprised of 16 percent of total malware in the month - representing an increase of 13.72% over March 2007. The new figures show that phishing is again rising while virus activity is on the wane.

April appeared to have fewer problems with viruses. However, there was heavy distribution of Stration worm in April so much that it was the only malware in the third position in Fortinet's chart of online threats. The company gathered most of the detections for the Stration virus on April 19, 2007.

IT Security Company SoftScan conducted a research also to find that phishing attacks were more prevalent. Considering the increasing use of phishing tactics, anti-virus companies have reclassified them as malware instead of spam. SoftScan's report points that 88.93% of e-mails in April were spam of which 1.92% was grouped as viruses.

According to Diego d'Ambra, chief technology officer at SoftScan, since phishing techniques have become highly sophisticated and they are more successful in capturing victims, the threat is more prevalent. BCS.org published this in news, first week of May.

Fortinet has also seen spam mails that contained images of celebrities without knickers. On clicking the link, the user reaches a pornographic site. The link has text surrounding it, collected from newsgroups and public Internet forums. These were computer newsgroups to photography forums in various languages. The idea of placing the text was only to avoid Bayesian Filters.

But this technique has a number of flaws, says Guillaume Lovet, manager of Fortinet Global Security Research Team. First an efficient anti-spam mechanism won't input text into its Bayesian filters, for text do not show up on user interfaces such as HTML comments and style parameter, Lovet said. Itpro.co published this in news on May 4, 2007.

Lovet explained that converting the non-visible content to visible content would yield an abnormally high value that would almost ascertain the e-mail as spam.

Related article: More Requests For Better E-Mail and Spam Control

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