Think the new built-in phishing filters in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 will protect your private data? Think again. The number of sites devoted to phishing skyrocketed last year, and the number of Americans taken in by phishing schemes has nearly doubled. In November 2006, the last month for which data is available, the Anti-Phishing Working Group found 37,439 new sites, up an astounding 709 percent from the 4630 sites in November of 2005.

Last October, both Mozilla and Microsoft released new versions of their browsers that use blacklists to block access to known phishing sites. In response, resourceful phishers are flooding new fake Web sites onto the Internet too quickly for them all to be shut down or blacklisted.

The alarming ease with which the fraudsters changed course, plus other new phishing tactics, makes some security experts say that phishers have the upper hand in the war against online fraud.

Source: Yahoo