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Online banking fraud increases 185 percent in first half of 2008 due to phishing attacks
Added: (Thu Oct 02 2008)
Comment: BorderWare, the messaging security company
Story: a report by payment association APACS found that online banking fraud increased by 185 percent in the first half of 2008. This increase, which equates to losses of £21.4 million to UK consumers is largely due to a exponential rise in the amount of fraudulent phishing websites being set up, approximately 20,000 from January to July this year.
Comment from Tony Caine, International Vice President of BorderWare: “The APACS report is worrying for organisations as a large number of these phishing attacks occur in the workplace. People are exposed to many more emails at work than outside and this creates problems. There are two main worries: the likelihood of staff compromising company or personal data in workplace phishing attacks; and an organisations customers being conned as a result of phishing emails sent in a company’s name. Both issues cause numerous customer service and financial problems for organisations.
“The only way to truly tackle these problems is through the creation of collective intelligence on the nature and source of phishing attacks to enable organisations to effectively block attacks before they reach personnel. From an outbound perspective, organisations have a responsibility to monitor the type and source of emails being sent from, or alleging to be from, their address and act accordingly.”
“An organisation that wants to protect its customers and its staff needs to be fully appraised as to the number of phishing attacks being made both in its name and at its staff, so it can take appropriate action. This data is widely available on the internet through sites like reputationauthority.org, which collects, assesses and rates data on malicious messaging activity collected from security systems worldwide. Protecting staff and customers properly necessitates a message security system that has access to this kind of data.”
Press contacts:
Nicola Craft / Toby Brown / John Brown
borderware@buffalo.co.uk
020 7292 8680