Headlines:
iDefense Helping Center Send Alerts Report: Phishing Site Life Spans Shrinking Zions Unit Reselling Check Scanners
iDefense Helping Center Send Alerts
The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, an industry group sponsored by the Department of the Treasury, has hired iDefense Inc. to provide it with cyber-threat alerts.
iDefense has been providing the trade group with alerts since the start of the year, but the FS-ISAC plans to announce the agreement today.
The center, formed in 1999, lets banks share information on cyber-security risks with each other. Byron Yancey, the center's executive director, said the deal with iDefense lets it provide the alerts more quickly.
The deal with iDefense "has been very successful" and is "a huge step in providing the industry at large with urgent warning on crisis events," Mr. Yancey said. "While we didn't wish to be an alert service, we realized that in order to play in this space, that you need to be first or second with alerts going out to this sector."
He would not say how much the center is paying, but he said iDefense is "a real patriot to take the chance" that it might cannibalize its revenue by providing its service to the center instead of to its members individually.
The center restructured itself at the end of 2003 to allow for tiered membership levels. Its lowest membership level is free, and even these members receive the most urgent alerts, which are sent out about 15 times a year, Mr. Yancey said. Paying members receive information below the urgent/crisis level.
The FS-ISAC has 930 members, and Mr. Yancey said it is open to new members.
Both the center and iDefense are based in Reston, Va.
Report: Phishing Site Life Spans Shrinking
Though the number of online scams and the number of banks impersonated has continued to increase, the life span of the scams has steadily declined, the Anti-Phishing Working Group reported.
In a report issued Thursday the Redwood City, Calif., trade group said "phishing" Web sites, which impersonate bank sites to steal customer account information, stayed up an average of 5.8 days last month. In October the group reported that the average phishing site stayed up for 6.4 days.
Since most of the scams ask for customer information through a Web site, rather than through the e-mail that is sent out, phishers cannot collect information once the Web site goes down.
Phishing sites often are hosted on computers owned by people who do not know their machines have been compromised. Once a host machine has been located, shutting it down can be as straightforward as phoning its owner and asking that the computer be unplugged.
The group also reported that virus keyloggers are an increasingly common component of phishing scams. The viruses steal passwords even when customers type them at a bank's actual site. According to the report, last month the group spotted variants of at least five keylogging "Trojan horses" (virus-like programs that do not replicate) that were deployed through Web sites.
Zions Unit Reselling Check Scanners
NetDeposit Inc., a unit of Zions Bancorp. of Salt Lake City that specializes in high-tech check clearing, is offering banks a line of desktop check scanners from Digital Check Corp. of Northfields, Ill.
Under an agreement announced Feb. 17, NetDeposit is reselling Digital Check's line of TellerScan products and will integrate the hardware with its own software for transmitting digital images.
NetDeposit offers for distributed image capture, sorting, and routing of electronic items. It said the Digital Check scanners will let corporate customers, bank branches, correspondent banks, and cash vaults capture check images remotely and transmit them electronically to the bank for processing.
