In a belt-and-braces approach, the gangs not only send you emails that direct you to spoof websites designed to look like they belong to a bank, but infect the PCs of their victims with Trojans too.

These Trojans are pieces of malware that lie dormant on a computer until the owner visits a banking website, when the Trojan activates and copies the information entered into the site. This information is then relayed back to the gangmasters.

Trend Micro has spotted one such scam using this approach in recent days, targeting Comerica and the Colonial Bank.

"Traditional phishing involves phishers sending out email messages that lead users to a fake site resembling login pages of certain institutions or companies. This time they've made sure they can get sensitive user information even without getting users to log in to some fake page," said Trend Micro's J M Hipolito.

Finnish security firm F-Secure recently claimed that phishing attacks were on the decline and that Banking Trojans were likely to become the bigger threat.

"Phishing is going away anyway. Banking Trojans are the big threat, and you need an up-to-date anti-virus product to protect against them," F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen told Web User.

www.trendmicro.com
www.f-secure.co.uk

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