US And S. Korea Major Victims Of Phishing Scams

The file, which is executed by the net start-up OpenDNS and gathers data from volunteers, affirmed 3,678 official phishing strikes, around 24 percent of which directed targets to servers in U.S.A. Further 14 percent phishing strike sent targets to servers in South Korea. Altogether, eleven nations--comprising Brazil, China and India, harbored the malevolent computers connected to over three quarters of total phishing strikes in October.

In October, the Phishtank group polled over 94,000 times covering above 7,300 phishing scams.

Generally, the group spent a little over 18 minutes to detect a phishing strike. EBay and its ancillary PayPal were the most exploited companies, with a huge 73 percent of total strikes in October exploiting these trademarks to tempt consumers. Nearly 80 percent of the phishing strikes carried a malevolent connection employing a domain name, while others employed a numeric net address.

Barclays was embroiled in a leading phishing outbreak in September 2006, however, in October, it dropped to the third place with 321 attacks, constituting around 8 per cent of the accounted phishing.

Hanaro Telecom Inc., the Korean telecom company, was discovered to be holding the maximum phishing scams, with 469 phishing websites tracked to its servers as per a report.

Lately, latest variants of both Firefox and Internet Explorer with inbuilt phishing security were launched. The vice president of OpenDNS, John Roberts, stated that he expects the web browsers will lessen phishing, however, he appended, "until the cyberspace itself reduces the strength of these phishing strikes, the volume of phishing strikes will not alter."

Phishing has evolved as one of the foremost dangers to net users, employing popular labels and genuine looking e-mail messages to trick targets. Majority of information on the progress of spam and phishing have identified the USA as the topmost origin of such strikes. Bot nets exploiting home PCs are progressively accountable for the increase in phishing scams.

Related article: US Passes Baton to Asia in Spam Relay

» SPAMfighter News - 11/13/2006