Phishing Grows in Severity, Sophistication

Phishing is one of the most significant threats to online consumers, and as the incidence of this type of fraud increases, so does the perpetrators’ average take. Phishers who lucked out and lured several customers of a British bank into false communications recently made off with an average of 5,000 pounds sterling, or US$9,348, per phished account.

With every successful intrusion on consumers’ financial identities, phishers also gain more financial resources which they can then use to invest in more programmers and technology to advance their sophistication in fraud.

Phishers may target tens of millions of online consumers, but they only need a tiny fraction of those users to bite for them to collect a handsome reward. And many more malicious e-mails, culled from ever-expanding data sources, are going out as the months pass, according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group.

Unfortunately, banks and other frequently phished organizations, as well as independent security developers, are moving more slowly to deter these attacks than the phishers are to commit them, said Peter Cassidy, secretary general of the group.

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