January 01, 2007 — CSO — Indiana University researchers conducted an experiment—after getting approval that it was ethical—in which they targeted eBay users with a phishing attack. The researchers, Markus Jakobsson and Jacob Ratkiewicz, thought of this as "spear phishing" because of its targeted nature, rather than the typical spamlike attempts to fool end users. The researchers had a success rate of up to 14 percent per attack per year, compared with previous estimates that phishing yields a 3 percent success rate. "We think spear phishing attacks will become more prevalent as phishers are more able to harvest publicly available information to personalize each attack," Ratkiewicz said.
Read more about malware/cybercrime in CSOonline's Malware/Cybercrime section.
Other stories by Scott Berinato
Understanding malware techniques and the ever-more sophisticated cybercrime ecosystem
Advanced evasion techniques emerge
Organized cybercrime revealed
Inside the global hacker service economy
Anatomy of a DDoS extortion attack
The rise of anti-forensics
The botnet hunters
Timeline: a decade of malware
- Introduction to VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5
- Introduction to Virtualization
- Preventing Unplanned Downtime with Server Virtualization
- Secure Cloud Infrastructure and Next-Generation Data Centers - An Interactive Panel for Decision Makers
- Gartner Next Generation Network IPS Webcast
- Understand Your Data: The Future of Backup and Archiving
- Patch Tuesday preview, February 2012
Microsoft published its Patch Tuesday Preview for February of 2012 a few minutes ago. IT admins can expect nine bulletins to address 21 security vulnerabilities.
It looks like four bulletins will be rated critical while the rest are designated as important.
Affected Microsoft products are:
- M86 report proves water is wet
- Actor, banker, soldier, spy: Suits and Spooks Anti-Conference aims to redefine security
More Salted Hash with Bill Brenner
