Rock Phish Group Accounts for 50% of Online Scams?

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It seems common in most things, and it’s the same in infosec and especially malware, phishing and spam.

The majority of malware, phishing attacks and spam mails are coming from the same few sources, I’d say it’s a case of 80/20.

20% of the people are sending 80% of the messages, one of the big groups is Rock Phish.

The first thing you need to know about Rock Phish is that nobody knows exactly who, or what, they are.

Wikipedia defines the Rock Phish Kit as “a popular tool designed to help nontechnical people create and carry out phishing attacks,” but according to security experts, that definition is not correct. They say that Rock Phish is actually a person, or perhaps a group of people, who are behind as much as one-half of the phishing attacks being carried out these days.

No one can say for sure where Rock Phish is based, or if the group operates out of a single country.

It would surprise me very much if they operated from a single country or were limited to just 1-2 locations.

“They are sort of the Keyser Söze of phishing,” said Zulfikar Ramzan, senior principal researcher with Symantec’s Security Response group, referring to the secretive criminal kingpin in the 1995 film The Usual Suspects.

“They’re doing some pretty scary things out there,” he added.

This criminal organization first appeared in late 2004 and was given the name “Rock Phish” because the URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) on the group’s fake sites included a distinctive subdirectory named “rock,” a technique the group abandoned once phishing filters began looking for the word.

They seem to generally go after Ebay and PayPal the two most lucurative accounts online I would say as they both store real live credit card details.

Apparently they are responsible for more than 50% of the phishing attacks we see.

Source: Computer World