Erris's Journal: Symantic: Online Crime Boomtime, Focus on Small Banks.

The BBC reports a thriving online crime community that has produced better tools and 212,101 new threats for the first six months of 2007. That's a 185% increase over the previous six months. The targets have also changed:

[there are] were signs that different sections of the underground economy were starting to collaborate to improve their chances of catching people out. ... criminals with information culled from job sites, online games or social networking sites were teaming up with phishing gangs and spammers ... The end result was well-crafted e-mail campaigns that gained a gloss of credibility by combining several different bits of data.

Often, he said, these targeted attacks were aimed at the customers of smaller financial institutions. "Attention has gone away from the larger banks down to credit unions and small banks that do not have the people and resources to fight off the attacks, Even the smallest bank has enough money,"

So I'm not the only one to notice an increase in scam mail quality. It's too bad the institutions we have to trust with our information are collecting more than they should and running second rate OS which make it easy to harvest.