Digital Home reports of the latest Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) report. During January, there were 12,845 new and unique phishing e-mail messages reported to APWG, making this a 42% increase over the previous month of December. In addition, the number of unique (or new) phishing email messages increased by 47% over the previous month. According to APWG 80% of the phish attacks are targeted to financial institutions and services.

Besides the report, APWG reiterates what people should do to avoid becoming phishing victims:

1. Be suspicious of any email with urgent requests for personal financial information -
2. Don’t use the links in an email to get to any web page, if you suspect the message might not be authentic
3. Avoid filling out forms in email messages that ask for personal financial information
4. Always ensure that you’re using a secure website when submitting credit card or other sensitive information via your Web browser
5. Consider installing a Web browser tool bar to help protect you from known phishing fraud websites
6. Regularly log into your online accounts and check that your bank,
   credit and debit card satements to ensure that all transactions are
   legitimate
7. Ensure that your browser is up to date and security patches applied
8. Report "phishing" or "spoofed" e-mails to the following groups by forwarding the email to reportphishing@antiphishing.com

[Via Digital Home, Canada -]

At least four sites that were targeted by the Artists Against 419 and its Mugu Marauder screensaver are now offline, Netcraft reports. The Mugu Marauder is designed to exhaust bandwidth allotments for financial scam sites with repeated image requests.

Artists Against 419 targets web sites it has connected with advance fee (419) scams
involving international money transfers. The group uses web
applications and organized "flashmobs" of web users to target sites
that remain online after hosting firms and law enforcement have been
contacted. 

Four of the five are now offline, with crownsecuritiesandfinance.com
(removed from DNS) and www.firstglobaltrust.com (account terminated by
web host) shutting down within days. Three sites housed at Chinese
hosts lasted longer. Abbeytrustonline.com and bancoplatinum-online.com,
housed at fz.fj.cn, became inaccessible last week.

Although screensavers who attack scammers or spammers’ websites and try to increase their bandwidth bill or bring them down altogether have a short term impact, do they really help in the fight against spam or Internet fraud? In what seems like a cat-and-mouse game fraudsters and spammers are very good and experienced in evading law enforcement. Won’t they be able to escape a simple DOS attack?

[Via Netcraft, UK -]

It seems that the recent problems ChoicePoint had are not its first contact with identity theft.

A review of public records across the country reveals the
Alpharetta-based company has been involved in at least 11 lawsuits
since 2000 involving possible misappropriation of information.

While it is not really clear what those misappropriation of information cases were about, it is somewhat inevitable for a major personal data clearinghouse not to get involved with identity and personal information misappropriation. I am hesitant to draw a pattern from these 11 lawsuits against ChoicePoint.

[Via MSNBC -]

Are we (or more accurately businesses, government, or other entities holding data) treatin our personal information too casually? A great editorial by Michael Hiltzik in LA Times on how if there was no California law requiring disclosure of potentially missing personal information of Californian residents, the company holding the data is required to disclose the incident to the affected users. Without this law, we probably would have never learned about ChoicePoint’s breach.

Indeed, there are indications that ChoicePoint’s first impulse was to
inform only California consumers, who account for about 35,000 of the
145,000 total victims identified so far. A public outcry soon convinced
it to change its mind and inform everybody.

[Via Los Angeles Times, CA -]