By John Leyden for The
Register
This article has been reproduced from The Register, with
permission.
The industry giant said that targeted attacks against specific
organisations and industries apparently geared towards
stealing critical data, identities or extorting money are on
the rise. Government, financial services, manufacturing and
healthcare industries are all in the firing line.
IBM has also seen a resurgence of targeted phishing attacks for
money laundering and identity fraud purposes. These attacks (35m in
Q1 2005, according to IBM) are becoming more focused with so-called
highly targeted and co-ordinated attacks at
a specific organisation or individual designed to extract critical
data increasing more than ten-fold over the first half of
2005.
Although fraudulent phishing mails rose, volumes of spam
decreased from 83 per cent in January to 67 per cent in June 2005.
Meanwhile incidents of virus-ladened emails increased from one in
every 51 emails in December 2004 to one in every 35 in January 2005
and one in every 28 by June 2005, IBM's Global Business Security
Index Report concludes.
IBM's conclusions are in tune with findings from the wider
information security industry on the increasing use of hacking and
computer virus attacks for criminals purposes. Separately email
security firm MessageLabs said that phishers are moving away from
large high-profile banks globally to target smaller, local banks,
with many instances occurring in countries in South America. On a
daily basis, MessageLabs discovers approximately 20 websites
harbouring malware aimed at compromising predominantly South
American banks.
© The Register
2005
