Fraudsters Launch Surprise Mass Phishing Attacks Against New Bank Targets

Fraudsters have begun attacking banks that have hardly been attacked till now, and hitting them suddenly in mass numbers. While previously fraudsters gradually increased the number of attacks on a given bank, now the AFCC is seeing very sudden and rapid growth against new targets. Over the past three months, several large to mid-sized banks in the US have seen a growth of thousands of percents in the amount of phishing attacks against them. Cyotas 24x7 AFCC constantly monitors and analyzes online fraud and phishing in order to provide its clients with FraudAction(tm). FraudAction is the companys anti-phishing service, including real-time alerts, detailed severity assessments, site shutdown services, forensic work and proprietary counter-measures. In addition, the AFCC, which supports Cyotas various anti-fraud and security services, identifies and analyzes new trends in the phishing and online fraud industry in order to develop suitable solutions that allow financial institutions to be prepared and respond accordingly. Today, Cyota services some of the largest banks in the world with its suite of anti-fraud solutions. Phishing is spreading, attacking new institutions in mass numbers, catching some by surprise. While initially phishing attacks focused on a few of the largest financial institutions, recently there has been a change in the targeted entities. As the leading banks have begun to deal with phishing and deploy solutions, such as Cyotas FraudAction service, and as phishing tools become more available, including Do-It-Yourself phishing kits sold on the Internet, there has been a recent change in target - phishing is spreading to financial institutions that were not attacked previously. The uniqueness of this trend and what causes alarm is the fact that fraudsters attack the less-suspecting targets with surprise attacks - multiple, subsequent hits, thus catching some financial institutions off guard and capturing as much stolen information as possible in a very short timeframe. Cyotas AFCC recently spotted several such cases where hundreds of attacks were launched within 3 months, compared to 1-10 attacks total against the same entities in the months before.