Phishing Assaults Drop 10% During Q2-2010

Internet Identity (IID), a company that provides technology and services, issued its phishing Trends Report for the Second Quarter disclosing that phishing attacks fell during Q2-2010 year-on-year.

States IID that phishing attacks dropped 10% during April-June 2010 in comparison to Q2-2009. But even with such a fall, there was a significant rise in phishing assaults aimed at gaming, social networking, web services and e-commerce websites.

The company further disclosed that Avalanche-launched phishing assaults had disappeared although other cyber crooks had stepped in as replacements. A highly flourishing gang of cyber-criminals, Avalanche carried out 66% of all phishing assaults across the globe during H2-2009.

And while 'Avalanche' together with other criminals is abandoning their phishing assaults, the groups are now spreading the Zeus malware designed to compromise PCs for grabbing e-mail account, social networking and banking logins that are shared within the wider network of criminals. Meanwhile, when Zeus creeps into an end-user's system, there occurs automatic ID-theft, thereby no longer requiring that person to provide his private details by way of answering a scam electronic mail.

Besides, conventional bank phishing still accounts for half of the entire phishing attempts. Despite that this kind of phishing has fallen from nearly 60% during Q2-2009.

United States is still the lead country so far as facilitating most phishing campaigns of the conventional kind is concerned. Canada climbed from No.7 to No.2 position, while Germany, United Kingdom and France occupied the 3rd, 4th and 5th places, respectively. Astonishingly, Russia and China are on No.9 and No.10, as per IID's report.

Says President and CTO Rod Rasmussen of IID, while a lot of measures have been taken towards combating phishing, online crooks keep inventing new techniques to execute their assaults. According to him, this is quite evident with phishers who've been most prolific so far, as they now focus wholly on the dissemination of Trojan Zeus. CBR published this on August 19, 2010.

Rasmussen added that, it was now crucial that organizations kept themselves guarded against phishing attacks during the near future, as IID had observed many new phishing scams getting executed on still more varieties of companies.

Related article: Phishing With A Redirector Code

» SPAMfighter News - 8/25/2010