More Identity Theft Offline Than Online-Study

Whew!!! Now I can relax, sit back and not worry about doing all of my banking online.

Phishers Drop Hooks Into Smaller Streams

It seems like it is only a matter of time before phishers drop their hooks into Credit Union and local bank streams.

On a related note, Thunderbird, Mozilla's email equivalent of Firefox, has a new phisher safeguard. The feature is supposed to alert users when the click on suspicious link within a suspected phishing email.

CheckFree Cashes In

The year over year growth numbers for online banking and bill pay have been terrific for years, mainly because they started from such a small base, and now that growth seems be translating into profits, at least for the companies that offer the infrastructure. Will it ever translate into verifiable increased profits for financial institutions? I don't know. It may just protect them from customer defection if they don't offer all of the online services.

Fraud victims facing cold shoulder

Some British banks are no longer going to offer blanket coverage of losses for customers who are victims of phishing scams. This article goes on to talk about the lax security measures that some British banks are taking to secure their sites. Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see how increased security, stronger password requirements, more authentication necessarily protect consumers and ecommerce sites from phishing. If you can convince someone to give up their user name and password with an email, what would be the problem with getting them to give up other kinds of personal information that could be used to compromise their accounts.

Momentum Is Gaining for Cellphones as Credit Cards

If it's in the New York Times, it can't be far from the mainstream.

Registration required.

Financials are phishers’ favorite targets

This small article is noteworthy for Scott Chasin's (of MX Logic) comment that phishing could have the same effect on ecommerce that spam has had on email. If this is true, and it sounds eerily dead on, ecommerce may have to shift in much the same way Internet communication has shifted from email to IM.