MailFrontier Launches Phishing Index To Track Alarming Trends in Email Scams
Phishing Emails Identified as Suspicious Continue to “Dupe”; One in Ten Users Mistake for Legitimate Email

Palo Alto, Calif. – June 17, 2004 – MailFrontier, a pioneer in email security and leading provider of anti-spam solutions, today launched the Phishing IndexTM to improve the way industry and law enforcement gauge and confront the alarming growth in phishing email attacks.  Overly focused on the volume of phishing emails, the industry has lost sight of the larger and more critical issue of how and why people get taken by phishing scams – something MailFrontier hopes to remedy with its new index.

MailFrontier Research tracks several factors to help corporations and consumers better understand and proactively protect against the rapidly evolving phishing attacks that appear in a variety of email forms.  MailFrontier’s Phishing Index tracks user vulnerability to phishing in a concerted effort to fight these scams more knowledgeably and effectively.  According to MailFrontier Research, the Phishing Index for May 2004 shows one out of 10 people who evaluated a phishing email, which had been labeled for them as suspicious, were duped into acting upon the email. 

“MailFrontier’s Phishing Index is a useful and meaningful metric for tracking the user behavior and vulnerability associated with email phishing scams,” said David Ferris, President of Ferris Research.  “It is more important to measure the potential impact of phishing email attacks, than to track the volume of phishing emails.”

The impact of divulging any personal data to a phishing scheme puts users and corporations at risk of potential catastrophic financial and security damage.  According to a June 2004 Gartner report, three percent of users who believed they had received a phishing email clicked on the emails’ links to spoofed web sites and entered confidential personal and financial data. 

“The fact that one in ten users still mistake a phishing email as legitimate, despite it being labeled as suspicious, is a recipe for disaster. Knowledge is power, especially when dealing with this type of cyber crime,” said Pavni Diwanji, CEO of MailFrontier.  “By making companies and consumers smarter about the risks that are out there, MailFrontier hopes to help email users take a more proactive and empowered stance against phishing.”

MailFrontier Research also has identified a recent phishing email which spoofs the Citibank brand as the “Scam of the Week.”  This particular phishing scam is seeking customer account information in a fairly typical fashion by popping up a fraudulent “Account Update” window on top of the real Citibank home page.  What is unique about this scam is how the fraudsters have implemented the pop-up “update” window so that the user cannot get the window to close until they enter information in the fraudulent screen.

MailFrontier Research publishes email fraud advisories on the latest attacks on the company’s Email Threat Information Center.  In addition, alerts on new, highly destructive phishing scams are proactively pushed to MailFrontier customers.  More information on MailFrontier’s Phishing Index and the “Scam of the Week”, including actual screen shots of this latest phishing attack, can be found on MailFrontier’s Email Threat Information Center at http://www.mailfrontier.com/threats/index.html.

About MailFrontier
MailFrontier is a leading provider of email security solutions that stop unwanted email by protecting enterprises from the growing number of dangerous and costly email threats while giving them the ability to anticipate and stop new threats as they emerge. MailFrontier offers enterprises a comprehensive defense against all known email threats, including spam, viruses, phishing, blended threats and other attacks, such as directory harvest attacks. MailFrontier has more than 500 enterprise customers, including Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Pier 1 Imports, PNM Resources, San Francisco Giants and Wyndham International. Founded in February 2002, MailFrontier is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. For additional information, go to www.mailfrontier.com.

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MailFrontier and Phishing Index are trademarks of MailFrontier Incorporated.  All other company and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.