The phishing was good in 2007: and it's getting better

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 18 December 2007 00:12

Your IT - Home IT

According to Avivah Litan, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Anti-phishing detection and prevention solutions are available but not used widely enough to stop the damage. These must be deployed and combined with solutions that also proactively detect and stop malware-based attacks....11 percent of online adults say they don't use any security software (such as antivirus or anti-spyware products) on their desktop, and another 45 percent only use what they can get for free."

Litan said bank regulators appear to be in the dark when it comes to measuring damage from phishing attacks. "The University of California at Berkeley conducted a Freedom of Information Act request, asking the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for all bank-reported data on fraud attacks between January 27, 2005 and May 30, 2007. Gartner and UC Berkeley analysed these data and found spotty, unreliable and unstructured data reported by US banks to the regulator. Just 451 unique incidents were reported in this period." She added: "The data quality was so poor that it was impossible to draw any conclusions from it other than that the regulatory reporting on fraud attacks is severely lacking."