Phishing Websites On The Increase

The content research team of IBM X Force has discovered more than 100,000 phishing sites that were created last week. According to the news reported by Computerweekly.com on June 21, 2007, between 11 June and 18 June this year the company identified, examined and noted almost 114,000 phishing sites.

As per the reports from the company, around 99.8% of the sites appeared from the automated phishing kit. The remaining 2% of the sites discovered did not follow any strategy for phishing attack.

As published by Computerweekly.com on June 21, 2007, director of security strategy for IBM ISS, Gunter Ollmann said that the amount of phishing sites was increasing at a swift pace along with the crime behind it. The phishing sites are well organized as the number of phishing sites and spam continues to increase day by day.

The hackers usually stole data like credit card numbers, password, and usernames. Moreover, almost all the attacks are conducted through instant messaging software or email.

As published in May 2007, a senior scientist at Mark Monitor, Laura Mather said that there had been many cases where the phisher would put several URLs on the same domain. By doing this, they block the Internet Explorer 7.0 and Fire fox 2 which serve as a protection for the user from phishing sites.

Vice president Director Public Relations at the bank, Patricia Martin, said that similar to various electronic retailers and financial institutions, Region bank was also victimized by phishing attack over the past several months.

According to the news published by Computer weekly on June 21, 2007, Martin added that from mid of May, there had been huge number of attacks on business bankers involving several US banks. The FBI and US department of justice had certified this attack as the biggest attack they have ever seen. Moreover, a very small part of their Interactive Treasury Management Services customers have been a victim of this fraud email.

As published by Computer weekly.com, Martin said that talks were on between law enforcement and clients to compensate the fund and to catch the hackers. Martin outlined the main inspiration behind this attack was the lack of awareness about phishing and fake emails on the part of the users.

Related article: Phishing With A Redirector Code

» SPAMfighter News - 7/6/2007