Introduction

During 2004, close to 2 million U.S. citizens had their checking accounts raided by cyber-criminals. With the average reported loss per incident estimated at $1200, total losses were close to $2 billion. The incidence of phishing e-mails e-mails that attempt to steal a consumer s user name and password by imitating e-mail from a legitimate financial institution has risen 4,000 percent over the past six months. The term phishing comes from the fact that cyber-attackers are fishing for data; the ph is derived from the sophisticated techniques they employ, to distinguish their activities from the more simplistic fishing.

Over the last few years, online banking, including online bill paying, has become very popular as more financial institutions begin to offer free online services. With the increase in online fraud and identity theft, financial crimes have changed from direct attacks to indirect attacks in other words, rather than robbing a bank at gunpoint, the criminals target the bank s customers. This type of indirect attack significantly impacts the financial institutions themselves because their inability to adequately protect their customer assets tarnishes their reputations and overall trust.

Originally termed carding and carried out by carders, phishing e-mails are just another form of spam. Universally regarded as an intrusive side effect of our electronic age, spam continues to proliferate at an unbelievable rate each month. According to antispam technology vendor Symantec (Symantec Internet Threat Report, Volume VII, March 2005), 63 percent of the 2.93 billion e-mails filtered by the company s Brightmail...