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Phishers – what are they and what do they do

Posted March 10th, 2010 by peter

Computerworld reported this morning (their London correspondent Carrie-Ann Skinner) that cybercriminals are expanding the types of organisations they exploit in phishing attacks. This got my attention. Well done Carrie-Ann

It appears that a record number of brands (356) were hijacked in phishing attacks during October last year – a whopping 4.4 % increase (0ver the previous highest in August) according to APWG (Anti-Phishing Working Group)

Wow – a 4.4% increase, but it was interesting to see in the APWG website that November was down to 306 and December 249 (the later being a minor -40% odd from October of the same year.

For those unfamiliar with the Phishing, in my uncomplicated definition, phishing is the sending of emails to you pretending to be your bank, or someone else you may have a relationship with in an effort to obtain account details from you.

The email tells you that your account has been compromised and encourages to click on the link and put in your login details to change your settings, or stop your account being suspended or something like that. The website you click to often looks extremely legitimate, in fact more often than note, it will look exactly like your bank account login.

To be fair, it is true that all mail servers with decent anti spam software cannot detect these types of emails. Particularly when a new phishing attempt is made, and the filters have not had time to recognise them as phishing attempts.

But really, after 4 years or so of seeing these attempts to get your private details and with the heaps of publicity over the years, who would actually click on such an email. Well, some can get caught out I suppose – like the FBI head Robert Mueller whos wife banned him from online banking after he nearly fell for a phishing scam.

Back to the Computerland story. Really – it must be a bad news day – how trivial, which I suppose makes this post trivial as well.

On one of the few days this “part time” blogger actually looks for an interesting story to tell our readers.