Headlines:
First Data Buying Germany's GZS
First Data Corp. is buying GZS Gesellschaft fur Zahlungssysteme mbH, a processor in Bad Vilbel, Germany.
In addition to processing payments, GZS provides issuing and acquiring services, fraud management tools, and crossborder debits. First Data said its aim in buying GZS is to boost crossborder services.
GZS processed about 982 million transactions in 2005. It also provides network services and electronic business services through its Easycash subsidiary.
Norbert Pawlowski, the chairman of the German company's management, said Friday in the buyer's press release, "As part of First Data, the staff of GZS will play a significant role in First Data's international expansion."
First Data is reassessing its domestic card-issuing business. In December it announced plans to cut 1,000 jobs, about 3% of its work force. The cuts will focus on its U.S. card-issuing business.
The Denver company announced in November that it had hired Morgan Stanley to help it decide whether to sell all or part of the underperforming business.
First Data did not say how much it had agreed to pay for GZS. It said it expects to close the deal in the second quarter.
Unique-Virus Growth in Phishing
A report from the Anti-Phishing Working Group says the number of distinct viruses used in phishing scams doubled from the end of May to midyear.
Many banks and observers have said that viruses are increasingly being used in phishing. It is hard for banks to fight viruses in phishing e-mails because they cannot control the anti-virus software that consumers use.
The new versions of these scams still involve impostor bank Web sites, but the viruses they distribute can steal passwords even when customers visit legitimate bank sites.
The Anti-Phishing Group said that in May, Websense Inc. of San Diego detected 79 unique keystroke-logging viruses - "keyloggers" - in phishing scams. That number nearly doubled, to 154, in June, and stayed above that mark throughout the summer. It fell to 142 in September but rose again to 154 in October, the latest month covered in the report, which came out in mid-December.
The number of scam e-mails that were reported to the Anti-Phishing Group rose 17% in October, to 15,820 mass mailings.
As with the number of keyloggers, this number dipped in the fall, but the October tally was the highest number of scam reports the group received in the past year.
The number of unique Web sites used in the scams dropped 17% from September to October, to 4,367. Despite the corresponding rise in phishing e-mails, the Anti-Phishing Group called the drop in Web sites "considerable."
The group, which uses Websense data to track the locations of the hosted sites it detects, said it found that most are hosted in the United States or China. But analysts have said hackers have probably taken over the host computers; the actual masterminds of the scams often reside elsewhere, such as Eastern Europe.
Though the Anti-Phishing Group's reports usually come out more than a month after the study period. But the group has put its location data in an online map that presents results from as recently as the past week.
In December the New York security vendor MessageLabs Ltd. warned that the computers used to send phishing e-mails were being used in smaller groups, making them harder to detect and shut down.
