F-Secure Corp., a Finnish company that sells security software, said it has spotted a spike in fraud attacks against banking Web sites.
One of the more common scams today is to place a malicious program on a user's computer that lies dormant until victims visit their online banking site. The program then steals the username and password as they are typed and immediately sends the data to another site.
The difference between this method and traditional keylogging is that it focuses more on banking and is thus harder to detect, F-Secure said.
Scammers are starting to favor this method because "with the enhancements that banks have deployed in terms of authentication security on their online banking sites, phishing attacks are becoming less and less effective," Mikko Hypponen, F-Secure's chief research officer, said in a press release Monday.
F-Secure, of Helsinki, said its products detect this scam through behavioral analysis.
