Phishers Can Easily Attack Out-of-date Software

    Phishers can easily attack software packages that are not kept up to date by website administrators. Hundreds of monthly attacks have been detected by Envisional, an Internet  intelligence company. Some of these attacks might be linked to religious fundamentalists. Phishers have also attacked US and UK banks, including Bank of America and LloydsTSB. Ordinary business or home computers, also called "zombie" computers are a target for phishers, if the computers are infected with Trojan horse programs downloaded in spam emails or by visiting infected websites. A study made by Envisional shows that this happens in 70% of the cases.

    Many websites present gaping security holes caused by out-of-date software. Thus, hackers are offered a clear path to break into these flawed and out-of-date programs. These vulnerabilities may have been fixed by the software vendors, but these security measures cannot be benefited from if the software is not kept up to date by the site administrators.

    Hackers breaking into these computers would boast or send political messages in the form of a kind of online graffiti. However, the hacking is more of  a silent job these days, and site owners don't realise that something has happened to their site, but hackers are allowed to perform phishing attacks or spamming by a code running in the background.

    Michael Wheatley, Chief Executive Officer at Envisional, said: "It is clear that just updating software more regularly could slash the hundreds of phishing attacks each month that use these zombie machines."

For instance, one of the attacks took place in October and it was detected by Envisional only on 25 February, four months later. The phishers had the opportunity to do anything they liked because  the site administrator didn't take care of keeping the software updated. Thus, the crooks used the site as the base for an attack on one of the largest US banks.

Three British banks have also suffered similar attacks in the past few days, as their vulnerabilities have been exploited in a similar way. and targeting at least  have also been seen.

Another phishing attack on Bank of America included hacked pages on the website under attack, filled with violent images and proclaiming "Everything for Islam".

This attack and another similar one on LLoydsTSB indicate that some of the phishing gangs may be linked with fundamentalists, in both these cases clearly from Turkey.

Advanced Automated Artificial Intelligence (A3I) search technologies are created by Envisional. Thus, businesses can discover items and information online that even unlimited human resources could never expose.

Global banks, oil majors, Hollywood studios and food giants hire the company works. Phishing, fraud, piracy, counterfeiting, trademark and intellectual property abuse can be detected with the company's Internet intelligence systems. These systems work with images and with any language or alphabet, producing selective, priority-ranked results that allow fast, decisive action to be taken. For more information, you can contact visit www.envisional.com.