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I hate to report how the bad guys are improving their methodology without immediately offering a remedy from the good guys, but this seems to be one of those cases. As always in dealing with phishing, never, ever reply to unsolicited email from even the most seemingly legitimate source. If you feel you might be having account troubles at your bank, with eBay, with Paypal, or whatever the site, simply log onto those sites directly.

In a report quoted on Brian Krebs’ Security Fix, the Anti-Phishing Working Group found that 52 percent more phishing sites were discovered this past October (bringing the total to 37,444). As if I even needed to tell you, that is the highest on record, and is 52 percent higher than September of this year, and 9 times the amount recorded from October a year ago.

Experts peg this near-exponential growth on a new phishing method called “Rockphish.” Just like botnets were started to circumvent spam blacklists (as blacklists stopped spam by denying its point of origin, but how do you deny thousands of different points of origin that are changing all the time), the tools to fight phishing are based on authenticating official webpages and shutting down those deemed illegitimate.

But as Krebs states, “In Rockphish attacks, multiple phishing scams targeting different banks are placed on the same Web server. Each individual scam page is assigned to an Internet subdomain that for a short time is tied to an Internet address of a compromised computer that the phishers control. When a would-be victim clicks on a link in a Rockphish scam, they are routed through the drone PC to the correct scam page.”

One phish-fighter stated that a single Rockphish attack generated 2,000 unique phishing Web addresses in two days. This allows them to rapidly change addresses of phishing sites, and represents a serious blow to the efficacy of the current phish-fighting tools.

Posted by pschooff in Phishing |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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