Phishing attacks by fraudsters have shot up by more than
80% in six months, new figures from security firm Symantec have
revealed.
Symantec said it had detected 157,477 unique phishing messages
in the first six months of 2006, up 81% on the previous six
months.
Symantec’s latest Internet Security Threat Report warned that
widespread internet worms had given way to smaller, more targeted
attacks focusing on fraud, data theft, and criminal activity.
Attackers were increasingly using evasive tactics to avoid
detection, while attacks aimed at client-side applications was on
the rise, the report warned.
The level of spam e-mails also increased in the first half of
the year, rising from 50% of all monitored e-mail traffic to
54%.
Most spammers were now including links to websites hosting
malicious code, rather than including the code directly in the spam
mail to reduce the chances of it being blocked.
Symantec also identified more than 4.6 million active bot
network computers, commonly used in denial-of-service attacks that
threaten businesses. During the first half of 2006, the security
firm recorded an average of 6,110 DoS attacks a day.
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