Phishing attacks increase, viruses wane

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Phishing is on the increase again, with virus activity declining, according to new figures.

Research from IT security company Fortinet found that phishing attacks, such as BankFraud.E and Phishbank.BGU, accounted for 16 per cent of malicious attacks detected by the company. An increase of 13.72 per cent on the previous month.

Virus activity appeared to be less of a problem this month. However, the Stration virus was seeded so heavily this month that it alone managed to reach third place in the company's list of internet threats. The majority of detections for this malware were gathered on the 19 April.

The firm also witness a number of spam emails containing pictures of knickerless celebrities. Clicking on the picture link in these emails leads the user to a pornographic site registration page. Around the link is text is taken from newsgroup and public internet forums, ranging from photography forums to computer newsgroups, in different languages, in an attempt to avoid detection from Bayesian filters.

According to Fortinet Global Security Research Team manager Guillaume Lovet, this strategy has several flaws.

"First of all, an intelligent anti-spam system won't feed its Bayesian filters with text that is obviously not displayed in user interfaces - HTML comments and style parameters typically aren't," he said.

Lovet added that computing the non-displayed content to displayed content would result in obtaining an unusually high value, "leaving few doubts about the true 'spammish' nature of the email."

"Finer filters may even notice that few people write emails containing more than 3,000 characters, and mixing different languages," he said.

A different report from anti-virus firm BitDefender found that the Mytob and Zafi worms topped its own top ten internet threat chart for April. These two items of malware for over 40 per cent of infections detected by the company last month.

"This rather dangerous piece of malware has been in active development for quite some time, with new versions hitting the internet every week," said Viorel Canja, head of BitDefender Labs.

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