Securybanks Phishing A Big Deal

Many years ago securybanks phishing entered in cyberspace as a amature's hobby. Now it has been grown up as a full fledge business. Now a day Phishing is more popular among professional hackers. Phishing is nothing but the bait to trap the innocent online users.

Basically phishing is a complicated thing that involves various activities such as luring the online users by sending out fake e-mail messages that ask recipients to enter personal information like credit card number, bank account details, password, user ID and social security number etc., into forms on a spoof Web sites that are replica of bank or e-commerce sites.

The information gathered by the hackers is used to withdraw money directly from victims' bank accounts; hackers also use this information to make purchases using the credit cards. Phishers used to sell stolen credit card numbers in online forums, where a single stolen account number is available for a sale approximately for a dollar or more.

The Modus Operandi

The series of phishing activities are handled in speedy manner by Phishers. It includes hosting spoof Web sites and sending e-mails to gather information and the actual scam of money laundering. Many spoof sites are deliberately made short-lived and vanished within a few days. The main purpose of such sites is mostly to dupe innocent online users. The actual Phishing activity starts within 24 hours after emails are sent. It has been observed that a typical Phishing attack lasts for a week.

A typical Phishing scam involves a dispatch of thousands of email messages with an attachment to bank customers whose email Ids were collected from a list stolen from database of a bank. In these email messages the customers of banks are requested to update their profile by clicking the attachment once a user clicks an attachment the backdoor Trojan modifies the PC's host file to direct your browser to open a spoof Web site instead of the legitimate banking or e-commerce site.

Phishers A New Fraternity

The Phishers fraternity has been emerged rapidly in recent years because Phishing needs a minimum technical skill with maximum monetary gain in short term with low risk. The attractive ratio of risk to reward has drawn the attention of several organized groups of criminals across the world.

These organized Phishing gangs of criminals have hired the highly paid hackers, virus writers and code crackers. The status of each criminal gang is decided by the rate of success in looting the innocent people and number of successful online scams they have made.

A History of Phishing Scam

Initially Phishing attacks were used to steal the password and user ID of Internet access account, when the Internet was an costly affair where the Internet user was heavily charged per minute for using a dial-up connection. The hackers were used to send spoof e-mails as to come from Internet Service Provider's (ISP) subscriber services department and ask recipients to verify user names and passwords. The hackers would then log on using the victims' accounts. Ultimately fooling the innocent Internet users by emptying their Internet account and leaving them nowhere with a huge bills from ISP.

At a beginning of 21st century when the Internet access became cheaper and the e-commerce boom took place the Phishers changed their target from Internet users to credit card users and online bank account holders.

The overwhelming success of online banking and e-commerce has opened the new avenues for Phishers where millions of online customers data is being ready to access by the Phishers.

Phishing and Anti-Phishing Working Group

The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), a group of security product vendors jointly with banks and e-commerce portals has taken these activities of Phishing fraternity seriously and already started fighting against this fraternity.

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