On November 9, Gartner Group released a study "Phishing attacks leapfrog despite attempts to stop them". In their news release, Gartner stated the following:
"The number of U.S. adults that are sure or think that they have received phishing e-mails has nearly doubled since 2004, according to a survey by Gartner, Inc. Financial losses stemming from phishing attacks have risen to more than $2.8 billion in 2006."
"The good news is that, this year, fewer people think they lost money to phishers, but when they did lose, they lost more," said Avivah Litan, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "The average loss per victim nearly quintupled between 2005 and 2006, and the thieves seem to be targeting higher-income earners who are also more likely to transact on the Internet."
"According to the Gartner survey of 5,000 online adults in August 2006, an estimated 24.4 million Americans have clicked on a phishing e-mail in 2006, up from approximately 11.9 million in 2005, while 3.5 million have given sensitive information to the phishers, up from 1.9 million adults last year."
""The anti-phishing measures some enterprises have put in place to protect their brand and their consumers are not working," Ms. Litan said. "Phishers are moving from site to site to launch their attacks more quickly than ever. The average life of phishing sites has gone from one week a couple years ago to about one hour in 2006. Within a year or so, phishing sites may be user specific — that is a single site will be set up to launch a phishing attack against a single user. It’s no wonder the detection services can’t keep up with these rapid criminal movements.""
Here then is the bottom line:
1. The number of spam emails is soaring to represent 91% of all email.
2. Phishing attacks are becoming more targeted.
3. There is no let up in sight where the "good guys" are going to be able to overcome the "bad guys" in the arms race.
4. In addition to having a strong perimeter defense layer, make sure you have a layered identity based defense system using stronger authentication couple with transaction authentication. Without this your enterprise is increasingly vulnerable to successful attacks by organized crime over the next two years.
Guy
www.authenticationworld.com
guy.huntington@authenticationworld.com
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