IBM States Phishing Increases 300 Percent in April

IBM is saying that phishing attacks rose 300 percent in the month of May, which passed the most recent record in January. 9.1 million e-mails were detected in May, three times the 2.8 million discovered in April.

Most of these attacks are carried out by software robots, which as also known as bots. Fraud e-mails imbed a program on a computer, which is under the control of another site that attempts to steal personal information.

Phishing is a form of online fraud using e-mail. Fraudsters attempt to dupe people into providing personal information. The information can be used in identity theft, or sometimes financial information from people's accounts is phished to be used in fraud schemes.

Many of these schemes are suspected to be done by organized gangs. For more information on this please read a previous post.

http://fraudwar.blogspot.com/2005/06/organized-fraud-gangs.html

For more information, click on the title of this post. Phishing can be researched further by using the keyword phishing in the search box at the top. Contained in some of these posts are direct links to resources to protect yourself from this growing menace.