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Internet & IT
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2006-10-15 07:09:43-04
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More and more people falling for phishing tactics
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Washington, Oct 15: Indiana University School of Informatics researchers have revealed that the percentage of internet users falling victim to scam artists masquerading as trusted service providers is much higher than earlier expected. For their study, researchers surveyors simulated phishing tactics used to elicit online information from eBay customers. The online auction giant was selected due to its popularity and because it is one of the most popular targets of phishing scams. The study found that the scams phishers were extracting responses from as much as 14 percent of the targeted populations per attack, as opposed to three percent per year. Phishing is what law enforcement agencies call the criminal practice of scamming people out of valuable information, such as bank account numbers. They use the name of well-known enterprises such as eBay, financial institutions and even government agencies to dupe people into giving out private information IU researchers Markus Jakobsson and Jacob Ratkiewicz wrote: "Our goal was to determine the success rates of different types of phishing attacks, not only the types used today, but those that don't yet occur in the wild, too".
Ratkiewicz and Jakobsson devised simulated attacks where users received an e-mail appearing to be legitimate and providing a link to eBay. If recipients clicked on the link they were in fact sent to the eBay site, but the researchers received a message letting them know the recipient had logged in. The researchers specifically designed the study so that all they received was notification that a login occurred, not the login information (such as the recipient's eBay password) itself-unlike a real phishing attack, which is designed to harvest passwords and other personal information. "We think spear phishing attacks will become more prevalent as phishers are more able to harvest publicly available information to personalize each attack. And there's good reason to believe that this kind of attack will be more dangerous than what we're seeing today," Ratkiewicz said.
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