eBay Phishing

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.