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An example of a phishing email, disguised as an official email from a (fictional) bank. The sender is attempting to trick the recipient into revealing secure information by "confirming" it at the phisher\'s website.
In computing, phishing is an attempt to criminally and fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. eBay, PayPal and online banks are common targets. Phishing is typically carried out by email or instant messaging,Tan, Koon. Phishing and Spamming via IM (SPIM). Internet Storm Center. Retrieved on December 5, 2006. and often directs users to enter details at a website, although phone contact has also been used.Skoudis, Ed. "Phone phishing: The role of VoIP in phishing attacks", searchSecurity, June 13, 2006. Phishing is an example of social engineering techniques used to fool users.Microsoft Corporation. What is social engineering?. Retrieved on August 22, 2007. Attempts to deal with the growing number of reported phishing incidents include legislation, user training, public awareness, and technical measures.
The first recorded mention of the term "phishing" is on the alt.online-service.America-online Usenet newsgroup on January 2, 1996,"phish, v." OED Online, March 2006, Oxford University Press.. Oxford English Dictionary Online. Retrieved on August 9, 2006. although the term may have appeared earlier in the print edition of the hacker magazine 2600.Ollmann, Gunter. The Phishing Guide: Understanding and Preventing Phishing Attacks. Technical Info. Retrieved on July 10, 2006. A phishing technique was described in detail as early as 1987, in a paper and presentation delivered to the International HP Users Group, Interex.Felix, Jerry and Hauck, Chris (September 1987). "System Security: A Hacker\'s Perspective". 1987 Interex Proceedings 1: 6. The term phishing is a variant of fishing,Spam Slayer: Do You Speak Spam?. PCWorld.com. Retrieved on August 16, 2006. probably influenced by phreaking,"phishing, n." OED Online, March 2006, Oxford University Press.. Oxford English Dictionary Online. Retrieved on August 9, 2006.Phishing. Language Log, September 22, 2004. Retrieved on August 9, 2006. and alludes to the use of increasingly sophisticated baits used in the hope of a "catch" of financial information and passwords. The word may also be linked to leetspeak, in which ph is a common substitution for f.Mitchell, Anthony. "A Leet Primer", TechNewsWorld, July 12, 2005.
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Phishing on AOL was closely associated with the warez community that exchanged pirated software. Those who would later phish on AOL during the 1990s originally used fake, algorithmically generated credit card numbers to create accounts on AOL, which could last weeks or possibly months. After AOL brought in measures in late 1995 to prevent this, early AOL crackers resorted to phishing for legitimate accounts.Phishing. Word Spy. Retrieved on September 28, 2006.
A phisher might pose as an AOL staff member and send an instant message to a potential victim, asking him to reveal his password.Stutz, Michael. "AOL: A Cracker\'s Paradise?", Wired News, January 29, 1998. In order to lure the victim into giving up sensitive information the message might include imperatives like "verify your account" or "confirm billing information". Once the victim had revealed the password, the attacker could access and use the victim\'s account for criminal purposes, such as spamming. Both phishing and warezing on AOL generally required custom-written programs, such as AOHell. Phishing became so prevalent on AOL that they added a line on all instant messages stating: "no one working at AOL will ask for your password or billing information".
After 1997, AOL\'s policy enforcement with respect to phishing and warez became stricter and forced pirated software off AOL servers. AOL simultaneously developed a system to promptly deactivate accounts involved in phishing, often before the victims could respond. The shutting down of the warez scene on AOL caused most phishers to leave the service, and many phishers—often young teens—grew out of the habit.History of AOL Warez.
The capture of AOL account information may have led phishers to misuse credit card information, and to the realization that attacks against online payment systems were feasible. The first known direct attempt against a payment system affected E-gold in June 2001, which was followed up by a "post-911 id check" shortly after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.GP4.3 - Growth and Fraud - Case #3 - Phishing. Financial Cryptography (December 30, 2005). Both were viewed at the time as failures, but can now be seen as early experiments towards more fruitful attacks against mainstream banks. By 2004, phishing was recognized as a fully industrialized part of the economy of crime: specializations emerged on a global scale that provided components for cash, which were assembled into finished attacks.In 2005, Organized Crime Will Back Phishers. IT Management (December 23, 2004).The economy of phishing: A survey of the operations of the phishing market. First Monday (September 2005).
More recent phishing attempts have targeted the customers of banks and online payment services. E-mails, supposedly from the Internal Revenue Service, have also been used to glean sensitive data from U.S. taxpayers.Suspicious e-Mails and Identity Theft. Internal Revenue Service. Retrieved on July 5, 2006. While the first such examples were sent indiscriminately in the expectation that some would be received by customers of a given bank or service, recent research has shown that phishers may in principle be able to determine which banks potential victims use, and target bogus emails accordingly."Phishing for Clues", Indiana University Bloomington, September 15, 2005. Targeted versions of phishing have been termed "spear phishing".What is spear phishing?. Microsoft Security At Home. Retrieved on July 10, 2006.
Social networking sites are also a target of phishing, since the personal details in such sites can be used in identity theft;Kirk, Jeremy. "Phishing Scam Takes Aim at MySpace.com", IDG Network, June 2, 2006. in late 2006 a computer worm took over pages on MySpace and altered links to direct surfers to websites designed to steal login details.Malicious Website / Malicious Code: MySpace XSS QuickTime Worm. Websense Security Labs. Retrieved on December 5, 2006. Experiments show a success rate of over 70% for phishing attacks on social networks.Tom Jagatic and Nathan Johnson and Markus Jakobsson and Filippo Menczer. Social Phishing. To appear in the CACM (October 2007). Retrieved on June 3, 2006.
Almost half of phishing thefts in 2006 were committed by groups operating through the Russian Business Network based in St. Petersburg Shadowy Russian Firm Seen as Conduit for Cybercrime, by Brian Krebs, Washington post, October 13, 2007
Most methods of phishing use some form of technical deception designed to make a link in an email (and the spoofed website it leads to) appear to belong to the spoofed organization. Misspelled URLs or the use of subdomains are common tricks used by phishers, such as this example URL, http://www.yourbank.example.com/. Another common trick is to make the anchor text for a link appear to be valid, when the link actually goes to the phishers\' site, such as http://en.wikipedia.orgGenuine.
An old method of spoofing used links containing the \'@\' symbol, originally intended as a way to include a username and password (contrary to the standard).Berners-Lee, Tim. Uniform Resource Locators (URL). IETF Network Working Group. Retrieved on January 28, 2006. For example, the link http://www.google.com@members.tripod.com/ might deceive a casual observer into believing that it will open a page on www.google.com, whereas it actually directs the browser to a page on members.tripod.com, using a username of www.google.com: the page opens normally, regardless of the username supplied. Such URLs were disabled in Internet Explorer,Microsoft. A security update is available that modifies the default behavior of Internet Explorer for handling user information in HTTP and in HTTPS URLs. Microsoft Knowledgebase. Retrieved on August 28, 2005. while the MozillaFisher, Darin. Warn when HTTP URL auth information isn\'t necessary or when it\'s provided. Bugzilla. Retrieved on August 28, 2005. and Opera web browsers opted to present a warning message and give the option of continuing to the site or cancelling.
A further problem with URLs has been found in the handling of Internationalized domain names (IDN) in web browsers, that might allow visually identical web addresses to lead to different, possibly malicious, websites. Despite the publicity surrounding the flaw, known as IDN spoofingJohanson, Eric. The State of Homograph Attacks Rev1.1. The Shmoo Group. Retrieved on August 11, 2005. or a homograph attack,Evgeniy Gabrilovich and Alex Gontmakher (February 2002). "The Homograph Attack". Communications of the ACM 45(2): 128. no known phishing attacks have yet taken advantage of it.[citation needed] Phishers have taken advantage of a similar risk, using open URL redirectors on the websites of trusted organizations to disguise malicious URLs with a trusted domain.Leyden, John. "Barclays scripting SNAFU exploited by phishers", The Register, August 15, 2006. Levine, Jason. Goin\' phishing with eBay. Q Daily News. Retrieved on December 14, 2006.Leyden, John. "Cybercrooks lurk in shadows of big-name websites", The Register, December 12, 2007.
Phishers have used images instead of text to make it harder for anti-phishing filters to detect text commonly used in phishing emails.Mutton, Paul. Fraudsters seek to make phishing sites undetectable by content filters. Netcraft. Retrieved on July 10, 2006.
Once the victim visits the website the deception is not over.Mutton, Paul. Phishing Web Site Methods. FraudWatch International. Retrieved on December 14, 2006. Some phishing scams use JavaScript commands in order to alter the address bar. This is done either by placing a picture of a legitimate URL over the address bar, or by closing the original address bar and opening a new one with the legitimate URL."Phishing con hijacks browser bar", BBC News, April 8, 2004.
An attacker can even use flaws in a trusted website\'s own scripts against the victim.Krebs, Brian. Flaws in Financial Sites Aid Scammers. Security Fix. Retrieved on June 28, 2006. These types of attacks (known as cross-site scripting) are particularly problematic, because they direct the user to sign in at their bank or service\'s own web page, where everything from the web address to the security certificates appears correct. In reality, the link to the website is crafted to carry out the attack, although it is very difficult to spot without specialist knowledge. Just such a flaw was used in 2006 against PayPal.Mutton, Paul. PayPal Security Flaw allows Identity Theft. Netcraft. Retrieved on June 19, 2006.
A Universal Man-in-the-middle Phishing Kit, discovered by RSA Security, provides a simple-to-use interface that allows a phisher to convincingly reproduce websites and capture log-in details entered at the fake site.Hoffman, Patrick. "RSA Catches Financial Phishing Kit", eWeek, January 10, 2007.
To avoid anti-phishing techniques that scan websites for phishing-related text, phishers have begun to use Flash-based websites. These look much like the real website, but hide the text in a multimedia object.Miller,Rich. Phishing Attacks Continue to Grow in Sophistication. Netcraft. Retrieved on December 19, 2007.
Alternatively, the phisher can create his own fake company to acquire peoples credit card information. By masquerading as an online travel agency, for instance, the customer believes to be dealing with a genuine company. The victim thinks he is ordering a product online, but the only thing that happens is that money is deducted and nothing is sent in return. In an even more aggressive approach, the company will \'give away\' promotion trips that only require the victim give his credit card information.
Not all phishing attacks require a fake website. Messages that claimed to be from a bank told users to dial a phone number regarding problems with their bank accounts.Gonsalves, Antone. "Phishers Snare Victims With VoIP", Techweb, April 25, 2006. Once the phone number (owned by the phisher, and provided by a Voice over IP service) was dialed, prompts told users to enter their account numbers and PIN. Vishing (voice phishing) sometimes uses fake caller-ID data to give the appearance that calls come from a trusted organization."Identity thieves take advantage of VoIP", Silicon.com, March 21, 2005.
In an example PayPal phish (right), spelling mistakes in the email and the presence of an IP address in the link (visible in the tooltip under the yellow box) are both clues that this is a phishing attempt. Another giveaway is the lack of a personal greeting, although the presence of personal details would not be a guarantee of legitimacy.
The damage caused by phishing ranges from denial of access to email to substantial financial loss. This style of identity theft is becoming more popular, because of the readiness with which unsuspecting people often divulge personal information to phishers, including credit card numbers, social security numbers, and mothers\' maiden names. There are also fears that identity thieves can add such information to the knowledge they gain simply by accessing public records.Virgil Griffith and Markus Jakobsson. Messin\' with Texas, Deriving Mother\'s Maiden Names Using Public Records. ACNS \'05. Retrieved on July 7, 2006. Once this information is acquired, the phishers may use a person\'s details to create fake accounts in a victim\'s name. They can then ruin the victims\' credit, or even deny the victims access to their own accounts.Krebs, Brian. "Phishing Schemes Scar Victims", washingtonpost.com, November 18, 2004.
It is estimated that between May 2004 and May 2005, approximately 1.2 million computer users in the United States suffered losses caused by phishing, totaling approximately US$929 million. United States businesses lose an estimated US$2 billion per year as their clients become victims.Kerstein, Paul. "How Can We Stop Phishing and Pharming Scams?", CSO, July 19, 2005. In 2007 phishing attacks escalated. 3.6 million adults lost US $ 3.2 billion in the 12 months ending in August 2007.McCall, Tom. "Gartner Survey Shows Phishing Attacks Escalated in 2007; More than $3 Billion Lost to These Attacks", Gartner, December 17, 2007. In the United Kingdom losses from web banking fraud—mostly from phishing—almost doubled to £23.2m in 2005, from £12.2m in 2004,"UK phishing fraud losses double", Finextra, March 7, 2006. while 1 in 20 computer users claimed to have lost out to phishing in 2005.Richardson, Tim. "Brits fall prey to phishing", The Register, May 3, 2005.
The stance adopted by the UK banking body APACS is that "customers must also take sensible precautions ... so that they are not vulnerable to the criminal."Miller, Rich. Bank, Customers Spar Over Phishing Losses. Netcraft. Retrieved on December 14, 2006. Similarly, when the first spate of phishing attacks hit the Irish Republic\'s banking sector in September 2006, the Bank of Ireland initially refused to cover losses suffered by its customers (and it still insists that its policy is not to do sohttp://applications.boi.com/updates/Article?PR_ID=1430), although losses to the tune of €11300 were made good.Bank of Ireland agrees to phishing refunds - vnunet.com
There are several different techniques to combat phishing, including legislation and technology created specifically to protect against phishing.
One strategy for combating phishing is to train people to recognize phishing attempts, and to deal with them. Education can be promising, especially where training provides direct feedback.Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Yong Woo Rhee, Alessandro Acquisti, Lorrie Cranor, Jason Hong and Elizabeth Nunge. (November 2006.). Protecting People from Phishing: The Design and Evaluation of an Embedded Training Email System.. Technical Report CMU-CyLab-06-017, CyLab, Carnegie Mellon University.. Retrieved on November 14, 2006. One newer phishing tactic, which uses phishing emails targeted at a specific company, known as spear phishing, has been harnessed to train individuals at various locations, including West Point Military Academy. In a June 2004 experiment with spear phishing, 80% of 500 West Point cadets who were sent a fake email were tricked into revealing personal information.Bank, David. "\'Spear Phishing\' Tests Educate People About Online Scams", The Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2005.
People can take steps to avoid phishing attempts by slightly modifying their browsing habits. When contacted about an account needing to be "verified" (or any other topic used by phishers), it is a sensible precaution to contact the company from which the email apparently originates to check that the email is legitimate. Alternatively, the address that the individual knows is the company\'s genuine website can be typed into the address bar of the browser, rather than trusting any hyperlinks in the suspected phishing message.Anti-Phishing Tips You Should Not Follow. HexView. Retrieved on June 19, 2006.
Nearly all legitimate email messages from companies to their customers contain an item of information that is not readily available to phishers. Some companies, for example PayPal, always address their customers by their username in emails, so if an email addresses the recipient in a generic fashion ("Dear PayPal customer") it is likely to be an attempt at phishing.Protect Yourself from Fraudulent Emails. PayPal. Retrieved on July 7, 2006. Emails from banks and credit card companies often include partial account numbers. However, recent researchMarkus Jakobsson, Alex Tsow, Ankur Shah, Eli Blevis, Youn-kyung Lim.. What Instills Trust? A Qualitative Study of Phishing.. USEC \'06. has shown that the public do not typically distinguish between the first few digits and the last few digits of an account number—a significant problem since the first few digits are often the same for all clients of a financial institution. People can be trained to have their suspicion aroused if the message does not contain any specific personal information. Phishing attempts in early 2006, however, used personalized information, which makes it unsafe to assume that the presence of personal information alone guarantees that a message is legitimate.Zeltser, Lenny. "Phishing Messages May Include Highly-Personalized Information", The SANS Institute, March 17, 2006. Furthermore, another recent study concluded in part that the presence of personal information does not significantly affect the success rate of phishing attacks,Markus Jakobsson and Jacob Ratkiewicz. Designing Ethical Phishing Experiments. WWW \'06. which suggests that most people do not pay attention to such details.
The Anti-Phishing Working Group, an industry and law enforcement association, has suggested that conventional phishing techniques could become obsolete in the future as people are increasingly aware of the social engineering techniques used by phishers.Kawamoto, Dawn. "Faced with a rise in so-called pharming and crimeware attacks, the Anti-Phishing Working Group will expand its charter to include these emerging threats.", ZDNet India, August 4, 2005. They predict that pharming and other uses of malware will become more common tools for stealing information.
Anti-phishing measures have been implemented as features embedded in browsers, as extensions or toolbars for browsers, and as part of website login procedures. The following are some of the main approaches to the problem.
Since phishing is based on impersonation, preventing it depends on some reliable way to determine a website\'s real identity. For example, some anti-phishing toolbars display the domain name for the visited website.Brandt, Andrew. Privacy Watch: Protect Yourself With an Antiphishing Toolbar. PC World - Privacy Watch. Retrieved on September 25, 2006. The petname extension for Firefox lets users type in their own labels for websites, so they can later recognize when they have returned to the site. If the site is suspect, then the software may either warn the user or block the site outright.
Another popular approach to fighting phishing is to maintain a list of known phishing sites and to check websites against the list. Microsoft\'s IE7 browser, Mozilla Firefox 2.0, and Opera all contain this type of anti-phishing measure.Franco, Rob. Better Website Identification and Extended Validation Certificates in IE7 and Other Browsers. IEBlog. Retrieved on May 20, 2006.Bon Echo Anti-Phishing. Mozilla. Retrieved on June 2, 2006."Gone Phishing: Evaluating Anti-Phishing Tools for Windows", 3Sharp, September 27, 2006. Retrieved on October 20. Firefox 2 uses Google anti-phishing software. Opera 9.1 uses live blacklists from PhishTank and GeoTrust, as well as live whitelists from GeoTrust. Some implementations of this approach send the visited URLs to a central service to be checked, which has raised concerns about privacy.Two Things That Bother Me About Google’s New Firefox Extension. Nitesh Dhanjani on O\'Reilly ONLamp. Retrieved on July 1, 2007. According to a report by Mozilla in late 2006, Firefox 2 was found to be more effective than Internet Explorer 7 at detecting fraudulent sites in a study by an independent software testing company.Firefox 2 Phishing Protection Effectiveness Testing. Retrieved on January 23, 2007.
An approach introduced in mid-2006 involves switching to a special DNS service that filters out known phishing domains: this will work with any browser, Higgins, Kelly Jackson. DNS Gets Anti-Phishing Hook. Dark Reading. Retrieved on October 8, 2006. and is similar in principle to using a hosts file to block web adverts.
To mitigate the problem of phishing sites impersonating a victim site by embedding its images (such as logos), several site owners have altered the images to send a message to the visitor that a site may be fraudulent. The image may be moved to a new filename and the original permanently replaced, or a server can detect that the image was not requested as part of normal browsing, and instead send a warning image.Krebs, Brian. "Using Images to Fight Phishing", Security Fix, August 31, 2006. Seltzer, Larry. "Spotting Phish and Phighting Back", eWeek, August 2, 2004.
The Bank of America\'s websiteBank of America. How Bank of America SiteKey Works For Online Banking Security. Retrieved on January 23, 2007.Brubaker, Bill. "Bank of America Personalizes Cyber-Security", Washington Post, July 14, 2005. is one of several that ask users to select a personal image, and display this user-selected image with any forms that request a password. Users of the bank\'s online services are instructed to enter a password only when they see the image they selected. However, a recent study suggests few users refrain from entering their password when images are absent. Stone, Brad (February 5, 2007). Study Finds Web Antifraud Measure Ineffective. New York Times. Retrieved on February 5, 2007. Stuart Schechter, Rachna Dhamija, Andy Ozment, Ian Fischer (May, 2007). The Emperor\'s New Security Indicators: An evaluation of website authentication and the effect of role playing on usability studies. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 2007. Retrieved on February 5, 2007. Besides, this feature (like other forms of two-factor authentication) is susceptible to other attacks, such as those suffered by Scandinavian bank Nordea in late 2005,"Phishers target Nordea\'s one-time password system", Finextra, October 12, 2005. and Citibank in 2006.Krebs, Brian. "Citibank Phish Spoofs 2-Factor Authentication", Security Fix, July 10, 2006.
Security skins Schneier, Bruce. Security Skins. Schneier on Security. Retrieved on December 3, 2006. Rachna Dhamija, J.D. Tygar (July, 2005). The Battle Against Phishing: Dynamic Security Skins. Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) 2005. Retrieved on February 5, 2007. are a related technique that involves overlaying a user-selected image onto the login form as a visual cue that the form is legitimate. Unlike the website-based image schemes, however, the image itself is shared only between the user and the browser, and not between the user and the website. The scheme also relies on a mutual authentication protocol, which makes it less vulnerable to attacks that affect user-only authentication schemes.
A method to prevent simple phishing of transaction numbers (TANs) is to associate each TAN with a "lock number"[citation needed]. The bank\'s server sends the lock number as a challenge, and the user provides the corresponding TAN as the response. The server selects the key-lock pair randomly from the list to prevent acquiring two consecutive TANs. Lock numbers are not sequential, so that phishers can only guess correct lock numbers.
Specialized spam filters can reduce the number of phishing emails that reach their addressees\' inboxes. These approaches rely on machine learning and natural language processing approaches to classify phishing emails.Madhusudhanan Chandrasekaran, Krishnan Narayanan, Shambhu Upadhyaya (March 2006). Phishing Email Detection Based on Structural Properties. NYS Cyber Security Symposium.Ian Fette, Norman Sadeh, Anthony Tomasic (June 2006). Learning to Detect Phishing Emails. Carnegie Mellon University Technical Report CMU-ISRI-06-112.
Several companies offer banks and other organizations likely to suffer from phishing scams round-the-clock services to monitor, analyze and assist in shutting down phishing websites.Anti-Phishing Working Group: Vendor Solutions. Anti-Phishing Working Group. Retrieved on July 6, 2006. Individuals can contribute by reporting phishing to both volunteer and industry groups,McMillan, Robert. "New sites let users find and report phishing", LinuxWorld, March 28, 2006. such as PhishTank.Schneier, Bruce (2006-10-05). PhishTank. Schneier on Security. Retrieved on 2007-12-07.
On January 26, 2004, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed the first lawsuit against a suspected phisher. The defendant, a Californian teenager, allegedly created a webpage designed to look like the America Online website, and used it to steal credit card information.Legon, Jeordan. "\'Phishing\' scams reel in your identity", CNN, January 26, 2004. Other countries have followed this lead by tracing and arresting phishers. A phishing kingpin, Valdir Paulo de Almeida, was arrested in Brazil for leading one of the largest phishing crime rings, which in two years stole between US$18 million and US$37 million.Leyden, John. "Brazilian cops net \'phishing kingpin\'", The Register, March 21, 2005. UK authorities jailed two men in June 2005 for their role in a phishing scam,Roberts, Paul. "UK Phishers Caught, Packed Away", eWEEK, June 27, 2005. in a case connected to the U.S. Secret Service Operation Firewall, which targeted notorious "carder" websites.Nineteen Individuals Indicted in Internet \'Carding\' Conspiracy. Retrieved on November 20, 2005. In 2006 eight people were arrested by Japanese police on suspicion of phishing fraud by creating bogus Yahoo Japan Web sites, netting themselves 100 million yen ($870,000 USD)."8 held over suspected phishing fraud", The Daily Yomiuri, May 31, 2006. The arrests continued in 2006 with the FBI Operation Cardkeeper detaining a gang of sixteen in the U.S. and Europe.Phishing gang arrested in USA and Eastern Europe after FBI investigation. Retrieved on December 14, 2006.
In the United States, Senator Patrick Leahy introduced the Anti-Phishing Act of 2005 on March 1, 2005. The federal anti-phishing bill proposes that criminals who create fake web sites and send bogus emails in order to defraud consumers could be fined up to $250,000 and be jailed for up to five years."Phishers Would Face 5 Years Under New Bill", Information Week, March 2, 2005. The UK strengthened its legal arsenal against phishing with the Fraud Act 2006,Fraud Act 2006. Retrieved on December 14, 2006. which introduces a general offence of fraud that can carry up to a ten year prison sentence, and prohibits the development or possession of phishing kits with intent to commit fraud."Prison terms for phishing fraudsters", The Register, November 14, 2006.
Companies have also joined the effort to crack down on phishing. On March 31, 2005, Microsoft filed 117 federal lawsuits in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. The lawsuits accuse "John Doe" defendants of obtaining passwords and confidential information. March 2005 also saw a partnership between Microsoft and the Australian government teaching law enforcement officials how to combat various cyber crimes, including phishing.Microsoft Partners with Australian Law Enforcement Agencies to Combat Cyber Crime. Retrieved on August 24, 2005. Microsoft announced a planned further 100 lawsuits outside the U.S. in March 2006,Espiner, Tom. "Microsoft launches legal assault on phishers", ZDNet, March 20, 2006. followed by the commencement, as of November 2006, of 129 lawsuits mixing criminal and civil actions.Leyden, John. "MS reels in a few stray phish", The Register, November 23, 2006. AOL reinforced its efforts against phishingA History of Leadership - 2006. in early 2006 with three lawsuitsAOL Takes Fight Against Identity Theft To Court, Files Lawsuits Against Three Major Phishing Gangs. Retrieved on March 8, 2006. seeking a total of $18 million USD under the 2005 amendments to the Virginia Computer Crimes Act,HB 2471 Computer Crimes Act; changes in provisions, penalty.. Retrieved on March 8, 2006.Brulliard, Karin. "Va. Lawmakers Aim to Hook Cyberscammers", Washington Post, April 10, 2005. and Earthlink has joined in by helping to identify six men subsequently charged with phishing fraud in Connecticut.Earthlink evidence helps slam the door on phisher site spam ring. Retrieved on December 14, 2006.
In January 2007, Jeffrey Brett Goodin of California became the first defendant convicted by a jury under the provisions of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. He was found guilty of sending thousands of e-mails to America Online users, while posing as AOL\'s billing department, which prompted customers to submit personal and credit card information. Facing a possible 101 years in prison for the CAN-SPAM violation and ten other counts including wire fraud, the unauthorized use of credit cards, and the misuse of AOL\'s trademark, he was sentenced to serve 70 months. Goodin had been in custody since failing to appear for an earlier court hearing and began serving his prison term immediately.Prince, Brian. "Man Found Guilty of Targeting AOL Customers in Phishing Scam", PCMag.com, January 18 2007. Leyden, John. "AOL phishing fraudster found guilty", The Register, January 17 2007. Leyden, John. "AOL phisher nets six years\' imprisonment", The Register, June 13 2007. Gaudin, Sharon. "California Man Gets 6-Year Sentence For Phishing", InformationWeek, June 12 2007.
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