Phishing On The Decrease?
By Ian Scott
use a combination of SpamAssassin, ClamAV, and Amavis to trap viruses and stop spam. This combination has also done a pretty good job of stopping some phishing type emails from being delivered to users on my email system.
I also use some RBL’s configured with Sendmail to prevent spam from reaching users on my system. A lot of phishing email is caught as spam through RBL’s such as SpamCop before the server even has to process it. I had been thinking that the combinations I had been using were doing a great job as I’d seen very little phishing type emails recently.
But, perhaps there’s more to it than that. Are phishers losing out to a better educated and more aware computer user? Although it is not that difficult to draft up an email, and send it out, there is still the economics of ROI, even if you are a fraudster. If the ROI for phishing schemes is getting lower and lower, it would seem then that there would be less and less of them going on.
One month’s worth of tracking probably does not make a trend. However, according to PC Magazine, there is evidence of an enormous decrease from July 2005 to August 2005 of phishing attempts. They are quoting statistists released by Postini, an email management service that phishing attempts decreased 90% from July to August.
According to the article, Postini tracked about 18 million phishing emails in the month of July, while in August, this was down to just over 1.8 million. As PC Mag asks, “Have the phish stopped biting?” Well, I guess we’ll have to have a few more months of statistics to find any real trend.
In the meantime, I’m pretty happy with ClamAV, SpamAssassin, and my combination of prevention methods on my server.
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