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McAfee Joins Anti-Phishing Working Group
SecurityProNews
Staff Writer
2004-09-20
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McAfee Extends its Research Capabilities in Anti-Phishing and Develops New Anti-Phishing Rules for McAfee SpamKiller and McAfee Managed Mail Protection.
McAfee today announced that it has joined the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), an industry association focused on eliminating the identity theft and fraud that results from the growing problem of phishing and email spoofing. McAfee has joined the APWG as a Premium Member and has received a special invitation to sit on the APWG Steering Committee, a group that contributes to setting the organization's operational activities, research emphasis and solutions development focus.
Phishing, which has grown dramatically over the last year, is one of the latest email fraud schemes to hit both enterprise users and consumers. Phishing involves an effort to get users to give up their private financial information such as passwords, Personal Information Numbers (PINs) and other identifying or security information through a combination of technical means and social engineering. According to a recent Gartner survey of 5,000 online U.S. adults, 57 million U.S. adults believe they have received a phishing attack email. More than 90 percent of the phishing emails were sent in the past year, and 1.78 million of the 11 million users who clicked on the emails' links to "spoof sites" remember entering confidential personal and financial data, such as bank account or credit card numbers.
McAfee, which provides secure content management solutions to help small to large enterprises optimize resources, increase productivity and prevent industry and company compromises, has incorporated new anti-phishing rules into its monthly rule set engine updates (RENUs). These RENUs have been released this month for customers using McAfee SpamKiller for Mail Servers, McAfee SpamKiller appliances, McAfee SpamKiller for SecurityShield and McAfee Managed Mail Protection. These new rules will target certain phishing-specific characteristics and upon triggering, the rules will be assigned a spam score that helps to block these messages.
"Over the years, phishing attacks have grown from simply stealing dialup accounts into a more sinister criminal enterprise, and the Anti-Phishing Working Group has made it its mission to wipe out these Internet frauds and help reestablish consumers' trust in the Internet," said Peter Cassidy, secretary general of the Anti-Phishing Working Group. "McAfee's work in anti- virus research will be especially important in understanding the next generation of phishing technologies -- worms, viruses and trojans designed for data mining and data capture. We look forward to working closely with McAfee in the APWG's working sub-committees and technology trials, where we can together further our effort to halt this criminal enterprise."
"McAfee is pleased to join the Anti-Phishing Working Group and to take a position on the Steering Committee," said Steve Crutchfield, director of product marketing for McAfee. "This will not only provide us with the opportunity to share our security expertise with other members, but will also enhance our ability to combat phishing attacks with advanced secure content management technologies. Through our ability to offer comprehensive McAfee anti-virus, content filtering and anti-spam solutions, we can protect the messaging and Web environments of our customers -- helping to ensure that they have the necessary tools to help keep their messaging traffic secure."
McAfee SpamKiller, which is part of the McAfee Secure Content Management solutions group, is designed to deliver secure content management technology to help businesses optimize resources, increase productivity and reduce their exposure to threats such as anti-phishing attacks. McAfee SpamKiller delivers unmatched spam protection and performance with an out-of-box highly accurate scoring system to determine whether a particular email is spam. With the extensive set of rules that run behind McAfee SpamKiller, each email receives a positive or negative score to determine its overall spam rating, and once spam is detected, messages are either delivered to the end-users inbox, personal junk mail folder or a system-wide junk folder.
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SecurityProNews is a daily online and email publication focusing on internet security issues.
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