Phishing Losses Not So Big; Confidence Losses Are Another Story
from the them's-the-breaks dept
So for all the talk about how phishing scams are growing rapidly, a new study is saying that the monetary losses from phishing are much smaller than expected: approximately $137 million around the world this year. Instead, the study says the real problem is that awareness of all these phishing scams means that people have lost confidence in legitimate email communications. If that’s really true, it might sound like a good thing, suggesting that people around the world were very quickly educated on the problem, and figured out a way to cope. The details, however, suggest that isn’t true. Many people fell victim to phishing scams, but it appears the scammers brought in so much info, so fast, that they only mined a small portion of it. That is, if you got caught in a phishing scam, you may have been lucky (for now) and the scammers didn’t use your info. Still, it’s questionable how accurate those numbers are. Other studies have claimed much higher numbers in losses. Either way, the rate at which phishing occurs has clearly been increasing, as had the sophistication of the scams. As with other scams and attacks, it’s clear that phishing is going to be with us for a long, long time.
Comments on “Phishing Losses Not So Big; Confidence Losses Are Another Story”
Phishing
I’m getting tired of forwarding these phishing attempts (with full headers etc.) to spoof@ebay, abuse@suntrust etc. As far as I can tell very little is actually being done to track the phishers down and lock them away.
Let’s have some positive stories about phishers getting caught!
Re: Phishing
We just had a large ring of Phishers caught in Australia that had scammed millions of dollars from people.
Crime does NOT pay people!!!
Ed Keay-Smith
SEO Research Institute, Search Engine Optimization
SEO Research Institute is a top rated Search Engine Optimization Company known for the high quality of their results.
Phishing & Spam
That may be true, but it may have another good consequence — people may be so worried about phishing that they stop responding to spam.
Of course, the same people who are clueless enough to respond to spam may also be the ones who get phished and may also not hear about what to do about either….
Re: Phishing & Spam
“Of course, the same people who are clueless enough to respond to spam may also be the ones who get phished and may also not hear about what to do about either….”
Agreed. A wise man once said that a fool and his money were lucky to ever get together in the first place.
– Freed