Heading in the opposite direction

Just one day before April 1st 2006 I came across this article :



"German retail banker Postbank will begin using electronic signatures on e-mails to its customers to help protect them from phishing attacks."



Catching up with the phishers seems to be a very worrisome future strategy. Electronic Signatures by themselves are rarely checked by anyone, and many more attack vectors are making the idea of this totally irrelevant. Moreover, a great research "Why phishing works" was recently released and it basically outlines basic facts such as how end users doesn't pay attention to security checks, if there's a definition of such given the attack vectors phishers have started using recently. In some of my previous posts "Security threats to consider when doing E-Banking", and "Anti Phishing toolbars - can you trust them?" I mentioned many other problems related to this bigger than it seems problem, what you should also keep an eye on is the good old ATM scam I hope you are aware of.



Postbank is often targeted by phishers, still, the best protection is the level of security awareness stated in here :



"Phishing attacks have led 80% of Germans to distrust banking related e-mails, according to TNS Infratest." Moreover, "Postbank's electronic signature service isn't possible with web-based e-mail services provided by local Internet service providers such as GMX GmbH and Freenet.de AG, according to Ebert. One exception is Web.de"



Thankfully, but that's when you are going in exactly the opposite direction than your customers are, while trying to estalibish reputable bank2customer relationship over email. Listen your customers first, and follow the trends, and do not try to use the most popular dissemination vector as a future communication one.



Something else in respect to recent phishing statistics is the key summary points of the recently released, AntiPhishingGroup's Report for January, 2006 report :



• Number of unique phishing reports received in January: 17,877
• Number of unique phishing sites received in January: 9715
• Number of brands hijacked by phishing campaigns in January: 101
• Number of brands comprising the top 80% of phishing campaigns in January: 6
• Country hosting the most phishing websites in January: United States
• Contain some form of target name in URL: 45 %
• No hostname just IP address: 30 %
• Percentage of sites not using port 80: 8 %
• Average time online for site: 5.0 days
• Longest time online for site: 31 days



I feel there's a lot more to expect than trying to re-establish the communication over a broken channel, as far as E-banking is concerned.



More resources you might be interested in taking a look at are :
Vulnerability of First-Generation Digital Certificates and Potential for Phishing Attacks
Netcraft: More than 450 Phishing Attacks Used SSL in 2005
SSL's Credibility as Phishing Defense Is Tested
Rootkit Pharming
The future of Phishing
Something is Phishy here...
Phishing Site Using Valid SSL Certificates
Thoughts on Using SSL/TLS Certificates as the Solution to Phishing



Technotati tags:
Security, Phishing, Scam, Banking