Major banking losses from phishing scams

I heard from a very authoritative source the other day that one bank in the EU is losing around EU1.5 million every day from e-mail phishing scams.

Banks are still not taking enough steps to deal with the problem.

It would not be difficult to ask a large number of banking customers to forward immediately to a central monitoring agency any suspicious messages they get. As soon as the first 5-10 duplicate spam messages are found the agency can respond by an immediate bombardment of the illegal site in a denial of service attack, shutting it down temporarily while other measures are taken to destroy the site.

But it has to be fast: a phishing scam can make many thousands of dollars in the first 10 minutes after an e-mail campaign begins.