Phishing is a scam in which the perpetrator sends out legitimate-looking e-mails appearing to come from legitimate e-commerce sites in an effort to obtain personal and financial information from the recipient. With consumers' personal information, tech-criminals then commit credit-card fraud, identity theft and even perform unauthorized bank account transfers.
"Phishing is still a new enough phenomenon that we are not surprised to see this kind of month to month fluctuation," said Andrew Lochart, senior director of marketing for Postini. "This drop off in August should not give people a false sense of security and cause them to let their defenses down."
Along with decreased phishing, the number of virus infected messages for the month of August decreased for the second month in a row, a drop of 27 percent compared to July. Postini prevented a total of 49 million virus instances from entering corporate networks. The company also protected its customers from more than 21 million directory harvest attacks (DHAs), a six percent decrease compared to July's 23 million DHAs. Legitimate e-mail as a percentage of total SMTP connections increased from 12 percent in July to 13.4 percent in August. Spam rates remained somewhat stable, representing 86.6 percent of the total number of e-mail messages sent. Only 13.4 percent of all messages were legitimate e-mail.
