chiya writes " Last year, EarthLink, the big U.S. Internet access provider, went hunting for phishers.



It started a campaign to track down people who were sending e-mail messages that purported to be from EarthLink but were actually attempts to steal customers' passwords, credit card numbers and other personal information.

What EarthLink found was that of the dozen or so people it could clearly identify as engaged in the practice known as phishing, more than half were under 18.

In its latest sweep, EarthLink discovered a lot of phishing e-mail coming from computers in Russia, other East European countries and Asia. The e-mail, and the Web sites they directed people to, were becoming much more technically sophisticated. A year ago, there were some phishers out there, and it was mostly teenagers and other people fooling around, said Les Seagraves, chief privacy officer for EarthLink. Now I think we are moving to more criminal enterprise.

The number of phishing attacks is growing rapidly, with the criminals impersonating Internet service providers, online merchants and banks. Government officials and private investigators say that all signs point to gangs of organized criminals - most likely in Eastern Europe - as being behind many of the latest efforts.

Like any other black market, there is a stratification in phishing, said Kevin Leininger, president of ICG, an investigative firm that has been hired by banks to find the people behind these attacks. There are people who are rank amateurs. And there are identity-theft rings.

So far, the offenders have largely evaded efforts to find them. One reason is that they often use computer worms, spread from machine to machine, to send the fraudulent e-mail - a technique that makes it almost impossible to trace the source.

Read More Here"