Targeting phishers

After going after software piracy in the 1990s, Microsoft Corporation has turned its attention to another scourge of the new century - cyber criminals who dupe people into providing electronic access to their bank accounts through what is known as ‘phising’. Phising is the term for creating official-looking websites of banks, credit cards and finance companies to get people to part with access details such as account numbers and passwords. Microsoft has launched a Global Phishing Enforcement Initiative, which is working with law enforcers in several countries to counter phishing and has already initiated 129 lawsuits in Europe and the Middle East. Statistics on phishing attacks are extremely worrying. Gartner, a research group, estimates that damages from phishing could be $2.8 billion in 2006. The number of attempts to trick people into passing bank details had doubled in the first half of 2006 to a whopping 157,000, according to Symantec, a security software vendor.