Phishing, Social Networking Attacks on the Rise
Threat Post reports the last year or so has seen a series of high-profile targeted attacks against corporate and government networks, including the Aurora attack on Google and others, the intrusion at RSA and the recent attack on the Sony PlayStation Network. But a new report from Microsoft shows that attackers increasingly are going after consumers with highly refined phishing attacks based on social networks. The company’s semi-annual Security Intelligence Report, which Microsoft released Thursday, found that from the beginning of 2010 to the end of the year, phishing attacks based on social networks increased by 1200 percent. At the beginning of the year, those kinds of phishing attacks accounted for about 8.3 percent of phishing attempts and in December that number had jumped to 84.5 percent.
