Globe and Mail Update Last updated on Sunday, Apr. 05, 2009 08:44AM EDT
Symantec Corp. has lauched the Symantec Phish Report Network, an extensive antifraud community in which members contribute and receive fraudulent website addresses for alerting and filtering.
Symantec Phish Report Network members — among them RSA Security, eBay and Wells Fargo — contribute URLs they have identified as fraudulent websites to the network, with eBay's contributions including information from its subsidiary, PayPal. Symantec then collects the data and distributes it to other network members such as Google, Yahoo and Netscape. These members use the data as part of their services to alert end users or filter access to fraudulent Web sites, better protecting consumers and businesses from phishing threats.
According to Symantec's most recent Internet Security Threat Report, one of the most comprehensive sources of Internet threat data in the world, 7.92 million daily phishing attempts were identified during the last half of 2005, an increase of more than the 5.70 million attempts per day in the first half of 2005. Phishing attacks attempt to deceive users into revealing confidential information for financial gain and represent one of the many types of cybercrime affecting businesses and consumers today.
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