Crime phisher steals $ 2.8 billion from consumers

On Thursday, research firm Gartner released the results of the survey, showing that criminals who commit phishing attacks have stolen an unprecedented amount of money. The stolen rate increased 5 times compared to last year while the amount of money recovered decreased.

E-mail phishing is becoming more and more sophisticated, increasing organization with increasing efficiency is beyond the guesses of the phishers themselves. Estimate for 12 months (starting August 30 last year), the total stolen money amounted to 2.8 billion dollars.

Although many analysts believe that phishing attacks have slowed down, Garter's researcher Litan said: " We are too subjective to think that there is a radical solution to phishing. It is similar. as spam, will also cause a loud and persistent 'echo' on the internet ".

According to Litan's research, it led the US to receive phishing e-mail in 2006 more than doubled in 2004. In 2006, 109 million people claimed to have been attacked, while this number of the year. 2005 was 79 million and in 2004 only 57 million. The percentage of people who received e-mail phishing and clicked on a phishing link in 2006 was nearly 25% (only 15% in 2005).

Sadly, while the number of people reported losing money in online fraud dropped to 24%, the total amount of stolen money increased from $ 257 million in 2005 to $ 1.244 billion in 2006. And the amount of money recovered or returned to consumers has been severely reduced.

" The recovery rate has decreased from 80% to only 64% ," Litan said. The average assault victim increased tenfold. In 2005, after recovering stolen funds, an average victim lost only $ 51; In 2006, this number soared to 572 dollars.

This growth trend is at an alarming level. Phisher's attack methods change rapidly in a short time. But the number of big banks suffering from losses is decreasing. Many large financial institutions have deployed important security programs, such as Citibank and the US National Bank, to help minimize theft. " They have to pay less, but prevent phisher advances. Forms like seahorses, raffles, phishing auctions and PayPal attacks no longer make it difficult for them. "

Litan calls for a traditional attack in the form of seducing and deceiving customers to reveal their bank card numbers, usernames and credit account passwords as "old hat".

The new form of attack cannot be determined in advance. They use sophisticated techniques that do not directly attack banks or credit accounts. Never leave, or if there is only a little trace to find the lost money. A typical example is the Western Union transfer of money to "sellers" in a fraudulent auction. " In most cases, the final payment is not made through the banking system and consumers cannot reverse anything when the money has been transferred ."

The fight with phishing is not easy. Crime seems to be one step ahead. Anti-phishing functions in new browsers such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer seem to be obsolete at the time they are introduced.

" A year ago, the average life of a phishing website was one week. But now there is only one hour. Most anti-phishing tools are mostly blacklisted (phishing websites). You can't go Blacklist of an IP address changes every hour. When IE7 launches to consumers, its anti-phishing function is too late for new forms . "

Many protection techniques, white lists (or a list of trusted websites) are still promising. New forms of detection and discovery of errors in the browser have not yet appeared, the future scenario has seen not seem to be brighter.

" When you lose the phishing war, you will lose more and not be able to recover. The less traditional attacks are, the more loss will be in 2007, even when the number is After all, the amount of lost money is expected to increase next year ".

T.Thu