Phishing costs hit $1 billion in the US
Messaging Pipeline notes that phishing costs have skyrocketed to $1 Billion in the US for the last year. This information, released from Gartner, shows that not only are the costs rising, but they are growing at a faster rate.
73 million American adults who use the Internet said that they “definitely” received or “thought they received” an average of more than 50 phishing e-mails. That number, said Litan, was 28 percent higher than the previous year, when 57 Americans reported that they’d been the target of phishing scams.
Phishing emails have quadrupled in the last 6 months. And, despite our best measures, these attacks are continuing to come through the filters.
Only America Online is actually identifying and blocking phishing mail from reaching its members’ mailboxes, Litan said. But even if others follow suit, that won’t eliminate the problem. “That would help stop theft at what I call the server level,” said Litan. “But if that happens, phishers will just step up their efforts to fly under the radar.”
New attacks are getting more sophisticated at grabbing personal information such as bank log-in information, resulting in large losses in funds. The survey reports that 1.2 million US adults lost money this way in the past year, for a value of $929 million.
So, the nearly $1 billion in costs associated with phishing is only hard costs. This does not include the soft costs of the trouble to set up new accounts or recover this information. it does not include the hard costs of repayment of funds, of developing anti-phishing systems, or non-banking related fund losses.
So far, the biggest need to fix the problem is two-way authentication - so the site confirms you are you and you confirm the site is legit. Not going to happen any time soon.
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