APACS Launches Anti-Phishing Web Site

The move follows APACS-commissioned research showing that 4% of internet banking users would respond to an e-mail, supposedly from their bank, asking them to click on a link and re-enter their security details. Despite the growth in such internet scams, the APACS research found that a quarter of the 585 surveyed conducted their on-line banking on a computer with no updated virus checker. Forty-one percent did not have an activated firewall. Around a third of those surveyed write their passwords down, while almost one fifth of respondents admitted that someone else knew the password for their on-line bank account, leaving them susceptible to having their on-line accounts accessed fraudulently, said APACS. According to the survey, over a half of respondents had never changed their password, while a quarter used the same password for banking as for potentially insecure non-banking web sites. APACS has therefore set up an advice web site, banksafeonline.org.uk to explain how phishing and Trojan attacks – software that is sneaked onto a computer to carry out malicious acts or give another user remote control of the target computer – happen and what steps consumers and SMEs can take to combat these scams.