Cases of Identity theft, phishing and Trojan attacks are increasing, said RSA
UK is a popular target because it was the pioneer for fast online payments, and consumers are used to easy and instant payment transfers, said Uriel Maimon, senior research scientist, RSA consumer solutions.
Financial firms continue to face new and emerging threats, and are challenges to increase confidence in the online medium, mitigate against risk and keep fraud loss low.
New scams are also emerging in virtual worlds, such as Second Life, according to Maimon. He said there are two common ways that attackers are targeting virtual worlds. Firstly, end users tend to use the same password for their virtual world as they do for their online bank account, so attackers try to uncover this through phishing attacks.
Secondly, they can try to transfer virtual money into real money. One elaborate method of doing this involves establishing an online power game against themselves, playing until they've 'lost' all the virtual money, then cashing this out in real money.
Online crime has become a mass market, and phishing attacks are increasing because it is a "statistics game". Each attack is cheap to execute, sometimes as low as $1 or $2, and each attack can live for around 100 hours.
"It's a funnel effect. In a phishing attack you can send out more than 500,000 emails. Of those, maybe only 300,000 are real email addresses, and then another 100,000 get past the anti-spam software, and maybe about 1,000 users click through the link, and perhaps the attack leads to only 50 compromised identities trickling through, garnering about £500 on average per identity," he said. As the attack is so cheap to execute, these types of attacks will still occur.
The second most common type of attack is the malicious Trojan through a compromised website. Maimon said this attack is growing in both popularity and sophistication, as the end user is usually unaware their computer is being infected.
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Last update : 23-11-2007 10:21
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