Attacks of fishers!!!

Fishers prefer to send the messages, first of all, people with incomes more than 100 thousand dollars a year, are informed with site Dark Reading referring to research of company Gartner. People with the incomes expressed in six--place numbers, have informed, that have received on the average on 112 letters from fishers for a year. The average user received on 74 fishing-letters for a year. Thus the average size of the loss suffered by rich users, has made 4632 dollars — in 4 times more, than the usual user lost.
On results of the second half-year 2005 and the first half-year 2006, the basic victims of fisher became users of systems online-banking. The British association of payment systems (APACS) approves, that losses of the British users in the first half-year 2005 have made about 27,7 million dollars. In the first half-year 2006 the sum of these losses has reached almost 43 million dollars.
Since 2004 the number of the American users who have received the fishing-letters, has grown from 57 million up to 109 million person. Financial losses from fishing in the USA thus have reached 2,8 billion dollars. In turn, APACS confirms high rates of growth of activity of fishers in the Great Britain. From 312 cases in the first half-year 2005, the number of the fixed fishing-attacks has reached 5059 in the first half-year 2006.
« Good news that smaller quantity of users have recognized itself as victims of fishers. However, thus those who all the same has given the money to swindlers, has lost more, than victims of the last years. The size of average losses for last year has increased almost in 5 times », — has noted vice-president Gartner Avivah Litan. As she said, attacks become more inventive.
Fishers start to depart from direct attacks of on-line bank systems and do an emphasis on less widespread brands, and also use difficultly defined methods of social engineering », — has emphasized Litan. As an example it has resulted a manner of criminals to simulate other structures using bank data of users — payment systems like PayPal.
Methods of protection from fishing become better, however still cannot stop attack completely. « Counter-measures like systems of definition fishing applied by banks, providers and other companies obviously are not widespread enough and effective », — speaks Litan. Not strongly improve a situation and updatings of browsers. « Many browsers updatings still are not completed. At least, two more years the number of fishing-attacks will grow, as are profitable business », — has noted Litan.
Authors of researches APACS and Gartner as most effectual measures against fishing have named formation of users it is necessary for them to explain, how much important to not open electronic letters from unchecked sources. APACS besides urgently recommends users to type addresses of resources in an address line of a browser manually instead of to use references and to make online-purchase only on sites with SSL-certificates.