Antispam outfit ClearMyMail has published a league table of the U.K.'s most 'phished' brands, with the NatWest bank way out
in front as the most targeted name (Learn more about antispam products from our Antispam Buyer's Guide).
According to the company, the bank accounted for 41% of all spam and fraudulent emails running through its servers, from a
top ten made up entirely of financially-based companies.
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Citibank was at number two, with 27% of e-mails, and HSBC third with 11 percent. The other seven covered a range of U.K. and
international institutions, including Abbey 6%), Lloyds TSB (4%), PayPal (2%), Royal Bank of Scotland (1%), Nationwide Building
Society (1%), HBOS (0.8%), and MBNA (0.5%).
The figures were monthly totals from the December 2007, a busy period that includes the spam high of Christmas. No indication
was given of the total volume of e-mail traffic involved.
"Without any e-mail protection U.K. online banking customers are at severe risk of being tricked into giving away their account
details to criminal gangs. The Phishing e-mails used are very well constructed and often look exactly like a legitimate message
from the bank," said ClearMyMail managing director Dan Field.
The company claims it is the only filtering company that can offer a "no spam" guarantee to customers, including the sort
of image spam that has been employed in recent months, with some success, to circumvent conventional filtering.
"It has almost got to the stage where cyber-crooks are building up a portfolio of e-mail databases containing contact information
that is profiled to fit a certain bank or building societies typical customer in order to improve the success rate of their
fraudulent attacks," said Field.
The list reflects the traffic of one relatively minor service provider, but it does offer some interesting clues to the nature
of fraudulent e-mail. The phishers appear to favor international institutions over U.K. ones -- several U.K. banks feature
way down the table in terms of the number of fraudulent e-mails despite being among the largest banks in Europe. NatWest-excepted,
U.K.-targeted emails appear, then, to be the exception rather than the norm.
