More evidence of the increasing sophistication of online fraud. Gartner says that phishing scams are increasingly targeting wealthy web users and that the number of adults to have received phishing e-mails has nearly doubled since 2004.
“The good news is that this year fewer people think they lost money to phishers, but when they did lose, they lost more,” said Gartner analyst Avivah Litan.
It will be interesting to see whether the anti-phishing measures in Microsoft’s IE7 have much impact on this, but my guess is that the best prevention will remain education, hence my book for home and SME users, ‘The Internet Highway Code’.