Phishing Attacks Rise Dramatically in 2008

Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert – Speaker

Stupid people get hooked by phishers. You have to be a complete idiot to get sucked into a scam email that has typos making requests that are geared toward naïve simple minded pea brain fools. Right? Yes? No? So why have phishing attacks risen dramatically in 2008? That’s 66% higher than in 2007.

Have we gotten dumber or are the attackers getting smarter?

RSA concluded that phishing attacks rose to an unprecedented 15,002 in April of 2008. Millions of people in mainly english speaking nations receiving ruse after ruse. 68% of US bank brands attacked. Less than 7% UK brands experiencing less than attacks.

However the UK takes the title for the most exploits as the most phished country in the world equating to 40% of the 135,426 cases detected by RSA.

This seems to be due to the UKs system allowing fraudulent transfers fast enough “real-time” to avoid detection. Criminals like real time fast cash.

Much of the success of phishers is that they are in fact getting smarter using “flax flux” attacks. *Fast flux is a technique used by botnets to hide phishing and malware delivery sites behind an ever-changing network of compromised hosts acting as proxies. It can also refer to the combination of peer-to-peer networking, distributed command and control, web-based load balancing and proxy redirection used to make malware networks more resistant to discovery and counter-measures. *Thank you Wikipedia.

Tonight I spent 2 hours on the phone in a webinar with a startup reviewing a fully functional toolbar that makes 54 checks to determine the validity of a website checking for phishing, pharming etc. All any bank needs to do is adopt the technology and require their clients to adopt it in the sign-in process. In most cases problems solved.

And do you know what we labored over in this call? How to get all the banks clients to install a simple toolbar that would protect them and the bank.

Why is this so difficult?

Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert discussing Scambaiter in video Here