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General discussion

E-mail hackers troll for victims

Mar 9, 2004 3:22PM PST

ONLINE auction site eBay and financial services sites are the most frequently attacked by "phishers" using "spoofed" e-mail, according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group.

Phishing, hacker lingo that denotes hunting for a victim, presents itself as an e-mail from a company with whom one has an account. Online thieves replicate the look of, for instance, eBay or Wells Fargo in an e-mail, a practice called spoofing.

While there has been a significant amount of publicity on this kind of identity theft in the past year, the Anti-Phishing Working Group, made up of about 120 companies with a stake in computer security, calculated that January 2004 saw 176 unique phishing attacks. Each one may have been directed at several thousand or even several million recipients.

The working group was formed under the initiative of Tumbleweed Communications in Redwood City.

On its Web site, www.antiphishing.org, the study lists the 24 most targeted companies.

http://www.theargusonline.com/Stories/0,1413,83~10819~2003561,00.html

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