Spam News

Phishing spam fools 55,000 per month

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Phishing spam that attempts to trick recipients into divulging personal information such as online banking login credentials has reached 7 percent of all spam, while spam researchers at IT security firm BitDefender estimate that phishing attacks fool 55,000 people every month.

Vlad Vâlceanu, head of the BitDefender antispam research lab, said the phishing landscape from January through June 2009 continuously evolved as web 2.0 phishing techniques keyed in on users of social networks for carrying out subsequent attacks. Attackers have developed fake login pages in an attempt to steal user login credentials.

"Most importantly, unlike malware, phishing and spam are universal e-threats - they work on any computer, regardless of their operating systems and security patches," Vâlceanu said.

Phishers' main purpose for stealing user identities is for targeting banks and wire transfer institutions. The top two targets of phishing websites in the first half of 2009 were Bank of America and PayPal, BitDefender reported.

Many phishing websites do a poor job of spoofing the genuine page with obviously misspelled words or negligent formatting that could tip a visitor off.

But recent attacks on Bank of America have used phony websites with text "impeccably laid out" and "an unusual attention to detail," BitDefender said, suggesting that the people responsible for the phishing attacks are a highly organized gang of cybercriminals.