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with-phishers-its-a-job

Posted by: admin 15 years, 11 months ago
Great article in the WSJ - I believe it's freely available at least for today - on phishers.

The typical phisher, he discovered, isn't a movie-style villain but a Romanian teenager, albeit one who belongs to a social and economic infrastructure that is both remarkably sophisticated and utterly ragtag.

If, in the early days, phishing scams were one-person operations, they have since become so complicated that, just as with medicine or law, the labor has become specialized.

Knowing why phishers do what they do and how they do it helps to predict their next move.

Mr. Abad himself is just 23 years old, but he has spent much of the past 10 years hanging out in IRC chat rooms, encountering all manner of hackers and other colorful characters. One thing that's different about phishers, he says, is how little they like to gab.

"Real hackers will engage in conversation," he says. "With phishers, it's a job."

So, if you can raise the bar enough to make it difficult, you will win the war. You can try to raise the risk of prosecution, but that is unlikely to work for attackers in foreign countries. Preventitive measures are the best way.
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