Phishing - the practice of luring unsuspecting people to authentic-looking fake Web sites of financial institutions, where they are conned into entering personal account details - is estimated to have cost people $437 million in the US alone (1).
Spam Sleuth, the anti-spam filter solution from Blue Squirrel, marketed in SA by Cirrus Techvue, has released a new analyser specifically to counter this threat. The latest edition includes a robust URL detection Analyzer that verifies fake URLs to prevent unsolicited phishing scam e-mail messages from reaching inboxes.
Colyn Dee, a director of Cirrus Techvue, commented: "It was imperative to address the phishing scam issue because 4-6 out of 10 e-mail messages the public receive are spam, and 20% of recipients are likely to respond to phishing e-mail scams (2).
These `spoofed` messages ask recipients to update or verify an account, password, credit card number, social security number; and are sent with information and branding identical to a real bank, insurance company, retail store, or credit card company.
Unlike most spam messages, phishing spam messages are all scams used to gather credentials to access and manipulate financial accounts. The significance of this problem has led several Australian banks to corroborate a $2 million fund to cover losses associated with phishing (3). Companies most affected by phishing scams include FDIC, Visa, eBay`s Paypal, AT&T, Citibank, SwiftPay.com, Bank One, and others (4).
Spam Sleuth monitors e-mail behind the scenes and analyses e-mail messages for spam, phishing, and virus characteristics. When an e-mail program gets e-mail, the spam has already been removed and the messages are read as before, but without sorting through the junk e-mail to find the gems.
Spam Sleuth 3.1 offers robust features:
* Boolean Logic Searching - Use AND, OR, NEAR search types to quickly find keywords and phrases. Spam Sleuth returns a list of highlighted, alphabetic results.
* Phishing prevention - Fake URL detection prevents unsolicited messages from reaching your inbox.
* Auto Responder - Respond automatically when on vacation, or other times you may not be able to respond to e-mail.
Spam Sleuth requires little configuration, removes executable attachments, provides detailed reports, allows the set-up of multiple accounts, and works with all POP3 e-mail accounts, including most company e-mail accounts, and Internet e-mail accounts. Spam Sleuth works with most e-mail programs, ie Eudora, Lotus Notes, Pegasus, Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape and Mozilla.
Through partnerships, Blue Squirrel also has solutions for MSN Web, AOL, free HotMail, and free Yahoo account users.
For more information, contact Cirrus Techvue on (011) 783 1508, or info@cirrus.co.za. Fully-functional evaluation software can be downloaded from http://www.cirrus.co.za.
(1) Ryan Naraine, Online Fraud Losses Hit $437M, CyberAtlas, 23 January 2004, http://cyberatlas.internet.com
/markets/finance/article/0,,5961_3303041,00.html
(2) Anti-Phishing Working Group, 11 February 2004, http://www.antiphishing.org/index.html
(3) David Berlind, Phishing: Spam that can`t be ignored, Tech Update Web Techology, 7 January 2004, http://techupdate.zdnet.com
/techupdate/stories/main/Phishing_Spam_that_cant_be_ignored.html
(4) Anti-Phishing Working Group, 11 February 2004, http://www.antiphishing.org/index.html
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