Bloomberg today ran a story "Crime Ring Used TD Ameritrade, Schwab in Online Fraud " which outlined how criminals netted over $700,000 from the use of phishing and malware to capture users brokerage account uid's and authentication passwords.
I suspect this story is just the tip of the iceberg. In December there were over 28,000 phishing sites. Vinton Cerf, one of the original internet creators, recently stated that one quarter of all internet computers (150 million out of 600 million) are being contaminated with malware and are acting as bots. Therefore, the likely impact of crime is probably at least a couple of orders of magnitude greater than the amount discussed in this story.
Guy
www.authenticationworld.com
guy.huntington@authenticationworld.com

del.icio.us