Do anti-phishing toolbars in web browsers stop phishing attacks? No. Can they reduce them, even for savvy users? Yes. Are they all equally effective? No.
MIT researchers found that users are highly likely to ignore anti-phishing toolbars… especially those designed to verify SSL certificates.
Min Wu, Robert Miller and Simson Garfinkel tested three types of toolbars:
Symantec on Monday relaunched an anti-phishing fraud service it acquired in its 2005 acquisition of WholeSecurity, and said major Internet players including eBay, Google, Yahoo, RSA Security, and Wells Fargo will participate in the data sharing group.
Microsoft, however, has dropped out.
The number of phishing attacks targeting non-English speaking financial institutions is on the rise.
Attacks targeting countries outside the English-speaking world now represents almost 40 per cent of worldwide phishing targets, according to data processed by RSA Security’s Anti-Fraud Command Centre. RSA said it has shut down more than 10,000 phishing attacks hosted in 70 different countries.
A security firm on Tuesday reported discovering a phishing scheme in which the scammers used Internet telephony to copy a bank’s automated voice system in order to steal customers’ passwords, account numbers and other personal information.
Opinion: Since e-mail standards won’t be of much help, we’ll have to deal with phishing through private, complementary services. Which will be the big guns?
This week’s E-mail Authentication Summit in Chicago on April 19 reminds me of the Internet community’s failure to agree on an authentication standard.
Read full story: The Future of Phish Fighting
With tax day approaching, federal officials are warning taxpayers to steer clear of e-mail scams offering fast access to tax refunds.
The IRS and the U.S. Treasury Department say bogus e-mails from the IRS have been increasing in number and sophistication since December 2005.
Click on an eBay auction listing, and you could get an unwanted result: a fake eBay login page, created by scammers looking to pilfer your username and password.
With about 181 million users worldwide, eBay is arguably the world’s most popular online marketplace. As such, the San Jose, Calif., company, with its online payment unit PayPal, is among the biggest targets for online scammers–including phishers.
To tech savvy punters most phishing sites are obviously bogus. But a recent study by academics at Harvard and Berkeley reveal that 23 per cent of users only look at the content of sites when deciding whether they are legitimate or not. The presence or absence of SSL certificates and the url of sites doesn’t enter into the decision of these potential dupes.
BOSTON – At the fourth annual MIT Spam Conference held in Boston Tuesday, speakers said that while the volume of spam ebbs and flows, the nature of unwanted e-mail is steadily becoming more dangerous.
In an unusual form of phishing, hackers cracked the computers hosting the Web sites of three Florida banks, redirecting banking customers to a bogus homepage in order to steal account information and other personal data.
