Wherever decent people gather, the spammers, shysters, scammers and phishers are sure to follow.
Since many phishers are not native English speakers, they send out some pretty sloppy prose.
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That means gangs of phishers are now monitoring and copying each others' tactics, says Mather.
It is important because spam, hacks, phishers and slimeballs are arriving in droves at an online space near you.
Sooooo, the phishers probably have a bunch of other e-mails and passwords for accounts starting with C through Z.
Our social streams are being polluted by scammers, spammers, phishers, groupies and people who are not who they claim to be.
"This is an arms race that the phishers have created, " says Mather.
Since late 2006, phishers have used a technique known as "fast flux" to make the location of their scam sites a moving target.
Though fast flux was originally developed by a Russian group of phishers in 2006, the tactic spread widely through the industry this past year.
But the company has never before revealed so much about its phishing attackers, nor has it shared images of the fake login pages those phishers use.
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But, said Mr Judge, the SPF technology is proving its worth when spotting e-mails from so-called phishers who try to pass themselves off as legitimate organisations.
Once the phishers purloin your account information, they can get right into your bank account and start stealing money or transferring it to other vendors to buy jewels and other merchandise.
They found rampant phony Wi-Fi hot spots created by phishers and, at several large airports, plenty of open or insecure networks run by critical operations such as baggage handling and ticketing.
In addition, sites like Facebook have some obligation to filter out spammers, scammers, phishers and other slimey people who would use their access to the rest of us for abusive purposes.
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Since most consumers have wised up when it comes to phishers, increasingly, fraudsters are turning to malware--installing Trojan software onto computers by getting consumers to click on links or on ads on legitimate sites.
In an era when consumers and corporations are storing and accessing ever larger amounts of data, the IT world faces increasingly sophisticated attacks from hackers, fraudsters, phishers, identity pirates and data-bushwhackers of every stripe.
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And while e-mail databases exist that enable phishers, spammers and others to blast their messages to huge chunks of users at once, it's tougher to get lists of telephone numbers, much less numbers specifically for smartphone users.
By leveraging the social connections in a network like Facebook or MySpace, phishers could send messages to a site's users that seem to be sent by a friend, and suggest visiting a page infected with bank code stealing software.
On top of these social engineering schemes, the transformation of phishing tactics is also occurring on the other end of the industry: Phishers are finding new ways to evade Web registries or Internet service providers that seek out and block malware-infected sites.
One reason that the phishers' tactics are increasingly effective: Instead of directly asking for bank account information in scam e-mails or on Web sites, cybercriminals are using hidden malicious software downloaded to users' desktops that monitors their online activities and records bank codes, Litan says.
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