Over the past week we saw more and more phishing emails every day. A major European ISP told us that within 24 hours they scanned 16 million messages and 268,000 were phisihng scams. And this wasn’t one scam – there were many different messages targeting companies including Citibank, US Bank, EBay, Pay Pal and Sun Trust.
Possibly, the recent outbreaks by Bagle.at and Bagle.au supported this flood, since these Bagles created new bot networks for spammer use.
On the other hand, the computer underground may be taking revenge for the successful arrests of fellow cyber criminals over the past several months around the globe.
We are monitoring the situation, but do caution users to be extra careful about answering emails from financial institutions.
Phishing on the rise