Phishing is going out of fashion

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The practice of phishing for bank details, in which fake emails claim to come from a legitimate financial institution and try to elicit account details, is traditionally associated with highly organised criminal networks.

Now, serious cybercriminals are apparently losing interest in harvesting consumer banking details but they are concentrating their efforts on gaining access to botnets, which are large networks of hijacked computers.

They use botnets to attempt to extort money, by launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against an organisation’s systems with information, causing it to crash. This can deprive an e-commerce site of visitors, and ultimately cost it money. It will also be virtually impossible to track their activity as they change the IP addresses and machines they use to launch attacks.

A chief security adviser said that systems should be made more resilient to make such DDoS attacks less of a threat adding that online gambling companies have just done that and other companies should follow their example.