Why Corporations Need to Worry About Phishing

Phishing is a relatively new form of online fraud that focuses on fooling the victim into providing sensitive financial or personal information to a bogus website that bears a significant resemblance to a tried and true online brand. Typically, the victim provides information into a form on the imposter site, which then relays the information to the fraudster.

To view examples of phishing emails go to:

* Citibank: www.ciphertrust.com/images/example_citibank.gif
* US Bank: www.ciphertrust.com/images/example_usbank.gif

Although this form of fraud is relatively new, its prevalence is exploding. From November 2003 to May 2004, Phishing attacks increased by 4000%. Compounding the issue of increasing volume, response rates for phishing attacks are disturbingly high, sometimes as high as 5%, and are most effective against new internet users who are less sophisticated about spotting potential fraud in their inbox.

Corporations should be concerned with the following four issues:

* Protecting employees from fraud
* Reassuring and educating customers
* Protecting their brand
* Preventing network intrusions and dissemination of trade secrets

A failure to succeed in any of these areas could be catastrophic to a company's ability to function in the marketplace. If employees are not protected, the company could be held accountable for not putting protections in place to prevent fraud. If a hacker impersonates a company, then the company's reputation and brand may be tarnished or ruined because customers feel that they can no longer trust the organization with their sensitive information. And finally, the latest trend in phishing has been to socially engineer employees or Business partners to divulge sensitive trade secrets to hackers. The implications of employee login information getting into the wrong hands could result in grave consequences once hackers are able to "log in" to an employee's network account using VPN or PC Anywhere software.

Protecting Employees from Phishing

One of the best ways to protect employees from Phishing is to prevent spam from ever getting to the user's inbox. Since most phishing attacks proliferate through unsolicited e-mail, spam filtering technologies can be very effective at preventing the majority of phishing attempts.

New technologies are also available to help prevent phishing. One such technology offered as a standard by Microsoft and supported by CipherTrust is the Sender ID Framework (SIDF), which prevents spammers from obfuscating their IP address by verifying the source of each email.

Of course, spam filtering and SIDF cannot solve the problem entirely. Many phishing attacks are actually sent on an individual basis to users not protected by cutting edge spam detection technologies. Other attacks are distributed through online email accounts such as Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, MSN, and others. In short, technology alone cannot solve the phishing problem. Employees must be educated about phishing and how to spot fraudulent emails and websites.

Reassuring and Educating Customers

Once a consumer receives a fraudulent email that appears to come from a trusted company, he or she may never trust that company's email communications again. That is damage that is not easily undone. It is essential that organizations communicate openly and frequently about how customers can identify legitimate email communications, and the need to report fraudulent ones. For those organizations that frequently process consumer credit card transactions, it is recommended that a special section of the site be devoted to helping customers avoid fraud.

Companies that make efforts to educate their customers about phishing are much less