ARLINGTON, Va. — Credit unions and banks continue to be targets of phishing and malware attacks in cyberspace.
Cyveillance Inc. said that more than 100 new brands were targeted by phishers in the last three months of 2007, and that about 90% of those were roughly evenly split between credit unions and banks.
The Internet security firm also noted that a trend that first became evident earlier in the year has continued, as the number of malware attacks outside the United States grew by 30% in the fourth quarter of 2007.
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For the year, Cyveillance said, more than 900 new brands were first-time targets of phishing attacks–more than double the number of organizations attacked for the first time in 2005 and 2006 combined.
The suburban Washington company (www.cyveillance.com) said that fraudsters also were continuing to grow in sophistication, increasingly using legitimate brand names and URLs to stage attempts to raid accounts.
Highlighting the rapid evolution of these scams in 2007 was the use of phishing attacks that took advantage of "lax security and unpatched server code" to use legitimate brand names and URLs to go after account information and funds, the company said.
Such attacks accounted for 51% of phishing attacks in the final three months of the year, compared with 38% in the previous three months, Cyveillance said.
"The use of compromised Web sites complicates the attack take down process for the targeted organization, because it requires that specific URLs be removed without disrupting the site's legitimate operations," the company said in its quarterly "Online Financial Fraud and Identity Theft Report."
Cyveillance technology continually sweeps the Internet, collecting information from more than 200 million unique domain name servers and 150 million unique Web sites, the company said.
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