It works like this: the more clueless a bank is about digital security and encryption, the higher the casher success rates for phished credentials on that bank, so the IRC offered payout deals are sweeter and that results in more phishing scams more directed at holders of those accounts. Totally simple, annealing to the optimum, free enterprise free market economics and all, and considering how totally clueless all my banks have traditionally been with their web-presence cludging, well, let's just say I'm concerned, and leave it at that.

Corrollary result: If you see a higher rate phishing scams targetting your bank, it's time to switch ...

This month's First Monday gives us a thoughtful and thorough tour through the minds and mechanics of the Phishing/Casher ecology, the result of Christopher 'Marlow' Abad's undercover gum-shoe phisher-phishing through the bowels of the chat networks ...

Phishing attacks are becoming more sophisticated and are on the rise. In order to develop effective strategies and solutions to combat the phishing problem, one needs to understand the infrastructure in which phishing economies thrive.

We have conducted extensive research to uncover phishing networks. The result is detailed analysis from 3,900,000 phishing e-mails, 220,000 messages collected from 13 key phishing-related chat rooms, 13,000 chat rooms and 48,000 users, which were spidered across six chat networks and 4,400 compromised hosts used in botnets.
[ The economy of phishing ]

Chris explains how it works, from how those with only marginal technical skills break into the networks and set up shop to the payout process through Western Union, and hoping that if we can understand how the blight spreads and grows, maybe we can figure out how to weed it out ...