14 DAY TRIAL // Cloudmark and YouGov conducted a new survey concerning the phishing attacks and their source, 42 percent of the respondents considering that their trust in a brand would be seriously reduced if a phishing message included the company's name. But what's more impressive is that 26 percent of the people included in the questionnaire said that they are the ones responsible for the their protection in front of the phishing attacks while 23 percent of them stated that it's the ISP the one that should block these attempts. In addition, 17 percent of the respondents said that the sender's ISP should fight against this kind of attack and try to block the phishing scams.
"Phishing is a highly sophisticated and well orchestrated form of crime. The gangs behind these attacks work to compromise financial information via e-mail scams and then propagate that information into a highly stratified and efficient economy, selling the data on to those who will profit from the accounts," commented Neil Cook, UK technology chief at Cloudmark.
"Earlier this year we conducted research into the effect that phishing has on the individual that found consumers were still extremely concerned about falling victim to such a scam. What is interesting to note from these results is that well-known brands are also suffering, with phishing attacks having a detrimental effect on their reputation. This knock-on effect will be particularly worrying for the banks, who rely on a high degree of trust with their customers."
The phishing attacks have always been pretty dangerous as they often targeted sensitive consumers' information such as bank details and credit card credentials. Since they attempt to copy a genuine website and make the users believe that they enter their information on an original website, it's hard to discover a scam by analyzing the URL of the page.
"Not only are we seeing evidence of more .uk phishing URLs, but also a shift in phishing techniques. Vishing is a good example of this where the scammers use cheap VoIP call centre systems as the back end to their phishing attacks, which changes the whole dynamic of trust," the Cloudmark official continued.