Bob Tedeschi reports in today's New York Times about the success online retailers have had this holiday season.

As of Dec. 26, year-to-date sales - excluding travel and auctions - reached $51.51 billion, up roughly 22 percent from $42.37 billion in the same period a year earlier. Those numbers could change slightly, ComScore said, as holiday returns are settled. And unlike most merchants, ComScore records revenues from gift certificates when the certificates are bought, not when they are redeemed.

Visa USA reported similarly positive results last week. Visa, which says its credit and debit cards are used in about half of all Internet transactions, said nontravel online retail sales from Nov. 17 to Dec. 25 increased 45 percent over the same period last year, to $4.9 billion. As of Dec. 25, year-to-date sales had jumped 37 percent, to $28.4 billion.

Gregg Keizer reports on InternetWeek.com on the growth in phishing attacks -- rogue emails sent out that attempt to get consumers to provide account details and passwords by impersonating financial institutions.

In the past two weeks alone, an estimated 60 million phishing e-mails have been sent to users, said Tumbleweed Communications, an anti-spam and secure messaging vendor that compiled the numbers from Anti-Phishing.org. Because the phishing messages often look remarkably official, down to logos and professionally designed forms for entering credit card information, an average of 5 percent of those who receive them respond.

Actually, we've heard anecdotally of even higher response rates to these unfortunate emails. Founded by Tumbleweed, the industry has recently established the Anti-Phishing Working Group to help deal with the threats from phishing attacks.