Phishing emails breaks 3 billion mark in April

Number of fraudulent emails has grown almost ten-fold in past nine months. Phishing - an official email that seems to be from an online bank or retailer, but is in fact a scam designed to steal personal financial information - is now a persistent threat, says anti-spam leader Brightmail.

The company saw more than 3.1 billion fraudulent spam emails last month That is 5% of all internet email worldwide. In August 2003, Brightmail recorded 300 million fraudulent spams. What makes the fraudulent emails so dangerous is that they look completely legitimate at first glance and in some cases look even more professional than the organisations site. Phishers forge legitimate from or received lines, copy graphics from the legitimate website, or use pop-up windows or URLs that look very similar to the actual ones. In addition, there seems to be a recent trend to include trojans or key logger viruses. Experts assume that organised crime is behind many of the phishing attacks. Brightmail Anti-Fraud works as a three-step process: 1. Fraud Detection: Brightmails patented Probe Network of over 2 million decoy email accounts sees fraudulent email spam as soon as it hits the Internet. 2. Fraud Alert: Brightmail Anti-Fraud customers are notified immediately of fraudulent email messages posing as messages being sent from their company. 3. Fraud Blocking: Brightmail provides specific rules to block fraudulent messages for the more than 300 million email users within the companys existing customer and partner base. Of the 96 billion emails that Brightmail filtered in April, 64% of these were spam messages.