In her interviews with banking and credit card executives, as well as law enforcement officials, Litan said that the boom in phishing is driven not by amateur hackers, but by organized crime, in particular drug cartels in eastern Europe. "They've discovered identity theft, and in some cases, given up their guns for online fraud."
The payoff can be lucrative -- Litan estimated that the direct cost to U.S. credit card companies and banks was over $1.2 billion in 2003 -- and the chance of getting caught nearly nil.
"Phishers have a one in 700 chance of getting caught," she said.
"They steal all the account numbers they can get, then they take those numbers to make checks and credit cards, to forge checks, and to transfer funds from the victim's account to their own," said Litan.
Gartner's results closely matched those of the Anti-Phishing Working Group, which collects data from Internet service providers and the spoofed companies themselves. In April, the group noted that eBay, PayPal, and Citibank were the top three spoofed firms during the previous month, a ranking confirmed by Gartner.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
