SDA India is an online resource for Software, Development,IT, Architecture, Open Source, Mobile, Security, Databases, Delphi, C, OS, Asp, .Net, Php, Xml, Java

Cloudmark announced the results of a survey conducted on its behalf by YouGov, which revealed that public confidence in consumer brands is dramatically affected by phishing attacks.

Out of 1,960 UK based consumers, 42 percent of the respondents claimed that their trust in a brand would be seriously reduced if a phishing message included the company's name. But what's more impressive is that 26 percent of the people included in the questionnaire said that they are the ones responsible for the their protection in front of the phishing attacks while 23 percent of them stated that it's the ISP the one that should block these attempts. In addition, 17 percent of the respondents said that the sender's ISP should fight against this kind of attack and try to block the phishing scams.

Banks, ISPs and social networking sites appeared to be brands most likely to feel the force of this negative response. Cloudmark’s own research has recently shown the Natwest Bank to be the UK brand most likely to be appropriated for phishing scams during October 2007. The research was collected using Cloudmark's user base, which consists of 260 million mailboxes.

“What is interesting to note from these results is that well-known brands are also suffering, with phishing attacks having a detrimental effect on their reputation. This knock-on effect will be particularly worrying for the banks, which rely on a high degree of trust with their customers,” said Neil Cook, UK technology chief at Cloudmark.

Cloudmark's research also indicates that across Europe, the majority of unique phishing websites are created using the top level domain associated with the United Kingdom, .uk.

“Not only are we seeing evidence of more .uk phishing URLs, but also a shift in phishing techniques. Vishing is a good example of this where the scammers use cheap VoIP call centre systems as the back end to their phishing attacks, which changes the whole dynamic of trust,” said Cook.

The phishing attacks have always been pretty dangerous as they often targeted sensitive consumers' information such as bank details and credit card credentials. Since they attempt to copy a genuine website and make the users believe that they enter their information on an original website, it's hard to discover a scam by analyzing the URL of the page.