Author: howard.haile

Phishing as a security risk has come a long way since its infancy and while phishing has changed its style; one thing that hasn’t change is its effectiveness in attracting victims. By combining modern technology and social engineering to gain access to information such as credit card numbers or passwords, criminal activity is flourishing across the Internet. In the May 29th, 2008, Quarterly Trends and Analysis Report by US-CERT (United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team), the top reported security incident was phishing. The documented risk noted by US-CERT bears itself out in statistical evidence tracked by organizations such as the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) which showed the number of unique phishing sites reported between January and March of 2008 was a combined 81,215. These staggering numbers highlight the reasoning behind the FTC Red Flag Rules.

If your company acts as a creditor, hopefully by now you have heard about the 26 FTC Red Flag Rules that you must be in compliance with by November 1st, 2008. The FTC reports that an identity is stolen every 4 seconds; and in 2007 identity theft was the number one consumer fraud complaint received by the FTC. So, it is easy to see why these rules and the associated penalties for non-compliance have been formed.