"The War on Phishing is far from over"
Posted by Kevin Joy on Fri, Jun 12, 2009
Gartner's recent report entitled "The war on phishing is far from over" provides us with both some insights into what companies require for protection and some interesting facts to consider on trends. The study was conducted via an online panel with 3,985 online adults with broad representation from across the US.
Key findings include:
- Gartner advocates a multi-prong security approach, including phishing e-mail blocking, safe browser surfing features, the use of site authentication, the detection of phishing attacks and the takedown of such attacks. There also is a bit on the need for continued education of customers and employees, like that which can be provided by services such as Phishme
- There was an increase of almost 40% in the amount of Phishing attacks in the year ending September 2008 vs the prior year
- The average consumer loss in 2008 was $351, down 60% year over year. Gartner believes that this is due to more institutions having detection systems in place, forcing more high-volume, low-value attack strategies to be conducted
- Somewhat surprisingly, 4.26% of those targeted in Phishing scams said they lost money to attackers, up from 2.97% in 2005. Roughly the same amount, 4.33%, admitted to giving away sensitive information. This speaks to the increased sophistication of social engineering techniques, particularly given the amount of awareness that has been generated in the media in the past few years for this type of fraud and how not to fall prey
- Consumers recovered 56% of their losses, and had the 30% or so that didn't bother to find out if they were covered had done so, almost all of these losses would have been borne by the banks, PayPal and other financial services providers
- While not specifically researched in this report, Gartner believes that Phishing related losses to corporate accounts via "SpearPhishing" and "Whaling" were considerable
- Evidence points to attacks moving away from purely being associated with known financial institutions to lotteries, dating sites, fake mortgage and pharmaceutical companies, which will make it harder for consumers to recover their stolen money
- Younger adults were found to be more likely to lose money to scams than older ones
- Roughly 58% of adults were aware of Malware and most of these understood the potential severity of the threat, but were more than likely to not know much about the means to protect themselves
- Usage of safe browsing features was limited to 36% of online adult consumers
All to say that fraudsters continue to be creative and persistent, that no one solution is perfect, but that there is evidence that points to the fact that companies that are taking action are being effective in mitigating the impact of such threats.