The experience prompted Sovereign to begin pilot projects with Boise,
Idaho-based MarkMonitor and Beaverton, Ore.-based Corillian Corp., two
companies marketing anti-phishing technologies to banks and e-commerce
sites, said Marianne Doran-Collins, senior vice president and director
of online banking at the Reading, Pa.-based bank.
"We're not interested in just waiting around for the next [attack],"
Doran-Collins said.
_____Recent Phishing Articles_____
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Technology Fueling Wave of Phishing Scams (washingtonpost.com, Jan 18, 2005)
•
It's Been a Day-to-Day Battle With Intruders (The Washington Post, Dec 26, 2004)
•
Companies Forced to Fight Phishing (washingtonpost.com, Nov 19, 2004)
•
How to Fend off Phishing (washingtonpost.com, Nov 18, 2004)
•
Phishing Feeds Internet Black Markets (washingtonpost.com, Nov 18, 2004)
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Other companies offering technologies to detect and disable phishing
sites also have seen a recent increase in the level of interest from
smaller financial institutions. Madison, Wis.-based NameProtect had
roughly 10 times as many inquiries in the last three months of 2004 from
small-
to mid-sized banks than it had the previous quarter, said Kevin Omiliak,
NameProtect's vice president of sales and marketing.
PNC Bank, which does business in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware,
Ohio and Kentucky, was first targeted by phishers late in August. The
scam site stayed up for more than 24 hours, though no PNC customers
have reported losses from the attack, spokesman Brian Goerke said.
A few days after the attack the bank contracted with two providers of
anti-phishing products, though Goerke declined to name those companies.
PNC was struck again in September, and the new technologies helped
the company shutter the phishing site in less than two hours, he said.
"We put things in place right away so that if it happened again we'd
be ready," Goerke said.
Banks and Internet service providers remain key targets, but there
are signs that phishers will continue to break into new areas of
business in 2005, said Mark Griffiths, vice president for VeriSign Inc.,
an Internet security firm based in Mountain View, Calif.
Griffiths said phishers have started mimicking power companies and
other utilities, trying to trick people into registering at fake utility
Web sites to pay their bills automatically online.
"These guys are definitely only going to get more bold and creative,"
Griffiths said.
