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Now this is a massive growth, 8000% percent..woah!
Thankfully losses are still ‘modest’ whatever that means, I guess although the attacks grow in
number, awareness an education also increases (in places like UK anyway) so the risk is fairly well mitigated.
UK incidents of phishing scams have grown 8,000 per cent over the last two years, according to the government’s financial watchdog authority. Although losses remain modest compared to other forms of financial fraud, banking security experts speaking before the House of Lords science and technology committee are concerned about the growing prevalence of scams designed to trick consumers into handing over online banking credentials.
The numbers are massively higher as recorded in the UK, and as they say detection quality has also gone up, so that would lead to higher figures. That means as always, the statistics could be in reality rather inflated.
Between January and June 2005, 312 phishing incidents were recorded, a figure that shot up to 5,059 for the first half of 2006, according to figures from UK banking payment organisation Apacs. Improved detection rates are partly behind the increase but even so the growing sophistication of scammers is leading to heavy losses from UK banks.
Apacs security chief Philip Whitaker told peers that scammers had transformed phishing scams from a cottage industry into an industrial process.
As always phishing is on the up, so be wary!
Source: The Register