Fergie's Tech Blog

Cyber Crime is Big Business

Via ManagementToday.co.uk.

With £361bn of our hard-earned cash up for grabs, it's no wonder that we're worried about online security...

According to a survey by software group VeriSign, 57% of us think that businesses are not doing enough to protect our personal information online. And the stakes are high: now we’re conducting so much of our business over the internet, the research found that the average UK punter has more than £10,000 stashed away in banking, gaming and shopping accounts that could be a target for cyber criminals.

In some ways we’ve only got ourselves to blame. These days we think nothing of handing over a wealth of personal information to banking, social networking and retail sites. We’ve all heard of phishing, email scams that use fake emails to obtain confidential information fraudently. But VeriSign has also identified a new danger that it’s dubbed ‘phoraging’, where the scammers use information that we’ve published online to guess passwords and trick their way into our accounts.

posted by Fergie @ 3/11/2008 05:47:00 PM