PayPal, EBay Phishes Continue Swimming

David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-05-02


PhishTank, a community project by OpenDNS to identify phishing threats, found PayPal and eBay atop its list of top ten targets for April 2007.

The PhishTank site serves as a community focused way of dealing with phishing attempts. Members submit suspected phishes to the site, and the community assesses and votes on them.

In April, PhishTank received 77,709 submissions. Out of that group, 40,549 were found to be phishing sites. Only 845 were verified as invalid by the community.

PayPal and eBay tend to show up at the top of lists when it comes to phishing, and it's no different on PhishTank. In their top ten list of targets, PayPal and eBay placed at one and two. Combined, they accounted for over 7,500 valid phishes. Eight banks followed the two in the list.

Month Of ActiveX Bugs Arrives: Yet another project featuring a day by day unveiling flaws in a widely used technology has been posted online, this time by a hacker called shinnai.

A new blog from shinnai said most of the bugs to be posted will be simple Denial of Service ones, but some will pose code execution threats.

So far shinnai has posted minor DoS ActiveX threats that can affect PowerPoint Viewer and Excel Viewer. Those are applications used by people who do not have Office or a comparable program to view slideshows and spreadsheets in Microsoft's formats.