Phishing is the practice of tricking unsuspecting customers of a business into imparting confidential information for illegal use. Phishing typically involves sending a false email to a customer, claiming to be from a legitimate business that the customer has had prior dealings with. The email entices the customer into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft. The phish email directs the user to visit a fraudulent web site that mimics the look of the legitimate business the customer normally deals with. On the fraudulent site, they are asked to update their personal information (such as passwords, credit card, social security, and bank account numbers).
According to a study by Gartner, 57 million Internet users in the US have received a phishing email, and 1.7 million of these have fallen victim to the scam.
Monitor the latest phishing activity and other threat information.
With the increased use of e-commerce, phishing exploits are expected to increase sharply. Phishing attacks cause damage in two ways:
1. They have the potential to inflict severe monetary and data loss due to fraudulent use of the harvested information.
2. They undermine consumer confidence in online commerce.
The sheer volume of online financial transactions makes phishing a high-reward, yet low-cost and low-risk business for scammers. The fact that so many millions of people can be targeted makes it worthwhile, even with low hit rates. And prosecuting the perpetrators of phishing attacks has proven to be difficult.
Information stolen from phishing victims is used in various ways by criminals, the most common being:
Marshal delivers enterprise-level gateway protection against phishing. MailMarshal SMTP stops most phish email before users ever see it. WebMarshal blocks user attempts to visit phish websites.
Marshal's powerful anti-spam technology features an automatic update service -including Zero Day updates - to counter the latest trends in malicious email.
Now available in both MailMarshal SMTP and WebMarshal, this DNS Blacklist-based classification allows you to block email that mentions sites associated with malicious activity - and also to block access to the sites themselves.
Marshal's original lexical analysis engine allows you to scan automatically the text content of email and Web pages, and block or restrict malicious content.
WebMarshal can classify sites based on input from third-party categorization sources such as SmartFilter.
Marshal solutions allow you to block phishing attempts at the network gateway - ensuring you can secure your confidential data, protect your users from identity theft, and comply with regulations on data privacy.
