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Phishing scams on the increase: report
28-02-2005
by Ciaran Buckley

An Irish security expert has predicted that the increased prevalence of phishing scams will lead to security upgrades for online banking services.

While the first Irish people to encounter phishing scams were those who participated in international payment programmes using PayPal for example, at the end of 2004 customers of the two main Irish banks -- Allied Irish Banks and Bank of Ireland -- found themselves to be victims of these scams, Conor Flynn, technical director of security firm RITS, told ElectricNews.Net.

The perpetrators of these scams sent an e-mail to the victims claiming to be from their bank. The e-mail requested that the recipient visit a website to confirm their online banking details. The site was controlled by the fraudsters, who collected the victims' details with the intention of gaining access to their bank accounts.

The AIB phishing e-mail was particularly deceptive, according to Flynn, who said it used the same logos, colours and fonts as AIB and even requested information from the customers in the same sequence as required by the bank's genuine online service.

He predicted that banks were likely to introduce new security measures to tackle the growing trend of phishing, such as dynamic password allocation systems which would serve to ensure that any details stolen would become obsolete within a short period of time.

Flynn's comments come in the wake of a new survey from the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) which found that more than 2,560 phishing sites were identified in January of this year, an increase of 42 percent from reports in December 2004. The survey also revealed that the number of phishing sites had grown by a rate of 28 percent per month since July, 2004.

The US hosted the largest number of phishing sites, with more than 2,560 sites in January 2005, according to the report, while China came in in second place, hosting 13 percent. Korea and Japan took the third and fourth positions hosting 10 percent and 3.1 percent of phishing sites respectively.

The average phishing site remained online for just under six days, while one spoofed site managed to remain online for 31 days.

Non-port-80 hosted phishing sites amount to almost 10 percent of all spoofed sites, the APWG found. Port 80 is the most common communications channel for internet applications, and alternative port usage is a phishing tactic used to evade filters.