New Phishing Record in May, IBM says

IBM has announced today that the phishing attacks have increased alarmingly. According to the report, more than 30 percent of the e-mails contained some form of virus and this represents a 33 percent increase from the previous months. In other words, there's something phishy going on.

IBM security experts attribute the increase in phishing attacks to the rise of zombie botnets being used to pump out massive volumes of the scam emails used in phishing attacks, as cyber-criminals look to increase their profits.

In addition, IBM reports that application hacking is how 90 percent of target systems are exploited. Two critical points in web application security are the creation and management of sessions and filtering all data input. These types of compromises from a web application can lead to exposure of banking information, private sensitive data like credit card information, and competitive intelligence information.

The phishing phenomenon is reaching epic proportions. Compared to January 2005, when the company recorded a peak, in May, that peak was exceeded with 226 percent.

IBM advises organizations to keep antivirus signatures up-to-date, and to keep current with Windows patches, so that they don't catch a phish in the hook.