Phishing Attacks Soar

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.