FARMINGTON HILLS – MicroWorld Technologies reported an all time high for phishing attacks in March tied to the tax filing season in the United States. Some 90 percent of these attacks were tied to financial services related to filing filing personal income taxes on April 17.

Phishing is the method of Online Identity theft using Smart Social Engineering or malwares like Trojans and Keyloggers, or sometimes combining both these techniques together.

A study by Microworld’s Anti-Phishing Working Group shows phishing attacks reached an all time high in the month of March with more than 18,000 new attempts backed by 10,000 new phishing web sites added on the Internet. The total number attacks ran into the millions, as each of these attempts targeted thousands of computer users.

Financial Services amounted to 90 percent of the total phishing attempts, ISPs and Retail chains stood at second and third places respectively. Of countries hosting phishing sites, the United States topped the list with 35 percent, China with 12 percent and Korea with 9 percent.

Phishers send spoof emails pretending to come from legitimate banks and business houses that carry a link to click on. The link opens up a fake website which looks similar to the official web site of the mocked firm. Users are asked to fill in a form with their personal and financial information.

Keyloggers or Rootkits capture classified information while the user visits authentic banking or other financial web sites. This stolen data will be mailed to a remote hacker through IRC channels or mails. Recently, MicroWorld Technologies had detected a new breed of URL Redirecting Trojans which can reroute users to fake, fraudulent web sites even when they type in the correct web address in the browser.

?If you want to counter phishing, you need to tackle spamming first,? says Govind Rammurthy, CEO, MicroWorld. ?Because majority of phishing scams spreads via targeted spamming. We at MicroWorld leverage the most advanced spam checking technology using RBL/DUL methods and a series of futuristic Content Filters. To counter phishing specifically, we?ve got highly sophisticated algorithms to identify such mails alongside a consistently updated list of phishing websites.?

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