The University of Indiana's School of Informatics recently published a study "Designing Ethical Phishing Experiments: A study of (ROT13) rOnl query features. that says that average response to phishing attacks is 11%. This is important to note since in 2004 Gartner was reported as saying that 3% of email phishing recipients actually responded.
For financial institutions like banks and credit unions, this is not good news. If the email can be well targeted against their customers (easier with credit unions whose members belong to a group e.g. universities) then the attack can have significant financial impact on them.
The use of stronger authentication doesn't stop phishing attacks. Therefore the financial institutions need to adopt better education techniques with their customer base in order to reduce their risk.
Guy
www.authenticationworld.com
guy.huntington@authenticationworld.com
del.icio.us