Cyveillance said in a new report that cyber criminals are shifting their phishing attacks to global targets and deploying sophisticated spear-phishing attacks that focus on individuals they hope will unknowingly give them access to the cache of cash.

And while banks and credit unions continue to be the top targets of phishers, the Fairfax, Va., company said, social media sites remain a growing favorite of online criminals “due to the inherent nature of these users to share personal information.”

Cyveillance said its analysis shows that nearly half of all new financial targets in the second half of 2010 were in the Middle East and India. Geographically spreading their targets and base of operations as well as leveraging distributed Internet resources is helping them evade detection and law enforcement, the company said.

Cyveillance also said that its analysis of active attacks on 13 of the top anti-virus vendors found that less than half detected the threat on average on day one. “As a result, visitors to a malicious website could have a more than one in two chance of being infected with malware,” the company said.

Cyveillance said it now collects information from more than 200 million unique domain name servers, 190 million unique websites, 80 million blogs, 90,000 message boards, thousands of IRC/Chat channels and billions of spam emails for clients who have more than 200 million end users.

Instant Insights /

Cyber Attackers Broaden Base, Focus of Targets

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