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Cyveillance: Internet Phishing Attacks Increasing
 TMCnet Contributing Editor
Cyveillance, a private Internet monitoring company, said today that it’s detected an 80 percent increase in the number of new targets of phishing attacks in the first half of 2008, as compared to the latter half of 2007.
The attacks average to more than two a day for the period and the increase accounts for nearly 20 percent of all new phishing attacks identified by Cyveillance since 2005, according to the company.
Cyveillance officials say their company uses bots and other tools to crawl through the Internet to identify cases of phishing attacks, identity theft, information leaks, IP infringement and other such online crimes. They say they’ve collected information from more than 200 million unique domain name servers, 150 million unique Web sites, 80 million blogs, 90 thousand message boards, thousands of IRC/Chat channels, billions of spam emails, auction sites and bot networks.
The company says it advises its clients of risks detected and also publishes an “Online Financial Fraud and Identify Theft Report” with the information gleaned using its Internet sweeping technology.
The 1H 2008 report says that 367 unique new brands were phished during the first half of 2008, with the total number of attacks detected against unique targets since 2005. The findings show that Financial Institutions were among the most likely to be phished, with more than 95 percent of the attacks being directed against them. The report notes that phishers continue to expand attacks worldwide, with a large number of attacks involving new targets being carried out against brands located in the Middle East and Latin America, officials say.
Cyveillance serves more than half the Fortune 50 with its Internet monitoring solutions and services and also provides indirect protection to consumers through partnerships with OEM service providers such as AOL and Microsoft ( News - Alert). Its ‘NetSapien Technology’ performs a human like search, actually looking inside Web sites, pages and newsgroup postings to provide in-depth information about the intent, content and meaning of each site, page and posting. The technology identifies a variety of client-related content; including text, logos, graphics, music, and video on sites that potentially divert eyeballs and revenue. It also drills down into the site to identify pertinent references in meta-tags, links and hidden/visible text used by rogue sites to leverage popular brands and products, company officials say.
Calvin Azuri is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Calvin’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
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