The Economy of a Phisher

I read an interesting blog post this morning on Phishing Social Networking Sites. There have been a few of these types of interviews floating around lately with similar content, but it never ceases to amaze me just how many victims of e-crime like phishing there are out there. This particular phisher said that he phishes about thirty thousand people per day!

Now, of course the big unknown here is whether "lithium" (the handle of the phisher being interviewed) is being honest (obviously his track record for honesty since he is a criminal is immediately debatable) in his numbers or inflating his stats just to show off. Either way, even if his number is inflated by a factor of 10, that still means 3,000 people per day are being phished just by this one person! Multiply that by the number of people sending phishing scams (I tried to research this number, but couldn't find a solid figure) and the number of victims on a daily basis is astronomical!

Radicati estimates that losses as a result of cyber crime in 2007 will be approximately $75 billion. A large part of these losses will be as a result of phishing scams.

The other interesting piece of this interview is that the phisher primarily targets social networking sites like MySpace. Security experts have long since said that the weak link in the security chain is user education. What better target than younger people who may not have a solid (or any) understanding of internet security? These people are prime targets and the phishers know it!

The internet is full of people of different backgrounds, levels of naivity, and levels of technical knowledge. Anyone is considered a "mark" for a scammer. Keep yourself educated. It's too late to understand the ramifications of cyber crime after you have already become a victim!