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Submitted by: Bill Hickey
NCVA List Master

NRT-0060 PHISHING ON THE RISE:

Think the new built-in phishing filters in Internet Explorer 7 and FIREFOX 2 will protect your private data? Think again! The number of sites devoted to phishing has skyrocketed last year, and the number of Americans taken in by phishing schemes has nearly doubled. In November 2006, the last month for which data is available, the Anti-Phishing Working Group found 37,439 new sites, up an astounding 709% from the 4630 sites in November 2005. Last October, both Mozilla and Microsoft released new versions of their browsers that use blacklists to block access to known phishing sites. In response, resourceful phishers are flooding new fake web sites onto the internet too quickly for them to all be shut down or blacklisted. The alarming ease with which the fraudsters changed course, plus other new phishing tactics, makes some security experts say that phishers have the upper hand in the war against online fraud. According to RSA, a security vendor, hackers in January started selling a phishing kit that lets criminals set up very convincing fake web sites with very little effort. The fake site pulls images and layouts from the real site, usually a bank or other financial institution, and passes the user's information back to the real site to mimic a regular log-in -- while keeping a copy of the account data for the criminals. Research firm Gartner estimates that 3.5 million Americans gave up sensitive information to phishers in 2006, an 84% jump from the previous year, for a total loss of $2.6 BILLION!!! One single phishing gang, called Rock Phish, is estimated to have taken in more than $100 million.

(PC World 26FEB)

Last Modified: Sunday, 04-Mar-2007 09:30:22 EST