IssViews Forum

Single gang behind two thirds of phishing attempts
Authorities single out Eastern European group
Robert McMillan

A new report blames a single Eastern European gang for about two-thirds of all phishing attempts conducted in the last half of 2009.

The phishing group - named Avalanche by security researchers because of the large quantity of attacks it generates - was blamed for more than 84,000 out of the nearly 127,000 phishing attacks tracked by the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), an organisation of companies and law-enforcement agencies that tracks phishing activity in its semi-annual reports.

Avalanche has used slick automated tools to crank out phishing attacks quickly, setting up fake websites and then spamming potential victims with email messages designed to trick them into typing in their usernames and passwords.

The group has targeted about 40 institutions, including major US and UK banks as well as online providers such as Yahoo and Google, said Greg Aaron, director of domain security with internet infrastructure vendor Afilias, one of the authors of the report. "They were able to ramp up and they became very, very large," he said.