Phishing on the Rise

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4498939.stm

Phishing seems to be on the rise. Traditionally, "Phishing" is where a victim is duped into going to a fraudulent website and entering information that is used to make them a victim of identity theft. This is normally accomplished with SPAM e-mail, which lures a victim to what they believe is a legitimate site. New toolbars are identifying a lot of these phoney sites. This article states the the origin of a lot of it is Taiwan, South Korea and China.

More sophisticated techniques are also discussed, such as using worms to implant key loggers so that the scam artists don't have to rely on duping the victim to do it manually. E-Mail is being used less and less in favor of more sophisticated hacking techniques.

Here is a link to "APWG" (Anti Phishing Working Group) http://www.antiphishing.org/. Contained in it is a lot of good information, including how the various scams work and how to avoid becoming a victim.