SurfControl Joins Anti-Phishing Working Group
SurfControl, a world leader in enterprise threat protection, today announced its membership in the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG). SurfControl will bring to APWG their diverse threat research capabilities, a thorough understanding of multi-faceted blended attacks and a proven track record of identifying and stopping new Internet threats. The SurfControl Adaptive Threat Intelligence(TM) Service will support the APWG's efforts to eliminate the fraud and identity theft resulting from phishing, pharming and e-mail spoofing. SurfControl's experience in identifying phishing attacks pre-dates the common use of the name "phishing" itself. In March 2003, SurfControl was the first to identify a dangerous new type of spam which the company called "brand spoofing." This spam sought to defraud email users by pretending to be from a well-known and trusted company. The attack would later be known as phishing. Since that time, phishing has evolved significantly, and SurfControl has continued to expand its products and services to address the changing threat landscape. More than 20,000 customers worldwide are protected from the full spectrum of blended threats by the SurfControl Enterprise Protection Suite and SurfControl ATI Service. "The anti-phishing community is hitting the phishers where it counts, in their pocket book, and we're making it increasingly painful to stay in business. It's costing phishers more to run their criminal ventures while their success rate is shrinking. It's imperative that we build on this success and expand our focus as the phishers have expanded their methods of attack," said Dave Jevans, Chairman of the Anti-Phishing Working Group. "We are pleased to add SurfControl to our ranks and look forward to their contributions." SurfControl will support the APWG's expanded focus to look beyond traditional phishing schemes to encompass emerging identity theft problems including pharming (DNS attacks) and crimeware (malicious spyware designed to steal identities). According to the APWG, while the number of conventional phishing campaigns reported rose from 14,987 in May 2005 to 15,050 in June 2005, the number of unique crimeware instances detected that were dedicated to password stealing nearly doubled from 79 in May to 154 in June. In a similar trend, the number of password-stealing malicious code URLs detected grew from 260 in April to 495 in May and to 526 in June. Phishers today are increasing their technical capabilities and the APWG reports that conventional phishing through social engineering will soon be displaced by advanced, automated crimeware based on keyloggers, redirectors and session hijacking technologies. "The phishing attacks we discovered in 2003 pale in comparison to the sophistication we are witnessing in today's phishing scams. Cyber criminals are becoming masters of their trade. Unified global collaboration of like minded authorities that draws from a broad set of disciplines offers the best way to keep pace with and stop these escalating attacks," said Susan Larson, VP of Global Threat Analysis & Research at SurfControl. "We're pleased to join the APWG and look forward to driving the industry dialogue surrounding the requirements for fighting the next-generation of phishing attacks."
Reproduced from an article published by PR Newswire
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