RSA Shuts Down More Than 500,000 Cyber Attacks Across 185 Countries
RSA Shuts Down More Than 500,000 Cyber Attacks Across 185 Countries
RSA FraudAction Service Helps Prevent US$7.5 Billion in Estimated Fraud
Losses Against Global Customers
BEDFORD, Mass. – December 6, 2011 – Now in its seventh year
operating one of the world’s foremost commercial online anti-fraud
services, RSA, The Security Division of EMC (NYSE: EMC), today announced
that its RSA FraudAction (http://rsa.com/node.aspx?id=3020)SM
anti-phishing and anti-Trojan service recently reached a milestone in
the fight against cyber crime. The RSA FraudAction service shut down its
500,000th online attack on behalf of its global customers and, to date,
has helped them prevent an estimated US$7.5 billion** in potential fraud
losses.
Click here
(http://www.rsa.com/go/press/RSATheSecurityDivisionofEMCNewsRelease_120511.html)
to view the social media version of this press release.
The RSA FraudAction service is a proven and proactive managed service
that is engineered to help protect customers, primarily in the banking
and online retail industries, against phishing, pharming and Trojan
attacks. The service is designed to provide 24x7x365 monitoring and
fraud detection, real-time alerts and reporting, forensics and
countermeasures, and attack site blocking and shutdown. Today, hundreds
of global organizations rely on the RSA FraudAction service to help
protect their customers against the latest online threats such as
phishing attacks
(http://rsa.com/experience/consumer/infographic/RSA_Phishing_Infographic.html).
“Phishing has reached pandemic levels globally, impacting business
and consumers alike, with billions of dollars being lost to cyber
criminals – yet electronic commerce and online banking continues to
thrive in nearly every corner of the world,” said Peter Cassidy,
Secretary General of the Anti-Phishing Working Group, a non-profit
global pan-industrial and law enforcement association. “Industry and
governments are collaborating to combat the threats and are finding
innovative ways to successfully leverage technology, intelligence
sharing and relationships to identify and take down phishing attacks
more rapidly than before which helps suppress their effectiveness and
greatly diminish their potential impact.”
According to November 2011 data compiled by the Anti-Phishing Working
Group
(http://www.antiphishing.org/reports/APWG_GlobalPhishingSurvey_1H2011.pdf),
the number of worldwide phishing attacks in the first half of 2011
(115,472) is up more than double over the same period last year (48,244)
and nearly matches the full-year phishing attack totals for 2010.
Despite this, the median phishing site uptime for attacks has decreased
by more than 22 per cent year-over-year (from 13 hours, 42 minutes, to
10 hours, 44 minutes).
“This milestone translates into significant cost savings for our
clients and helps to establish the trusted environment their customers
depend upon,” said RSA President Tom Heiser. “In the first half of
2011 alone, the RSA FraudAction service saved our customers an estimated
US$520 million that might otherwise be lost to online attacks such as
phishing and pharming. Not only does this enable customers to operate
more profitably, RSA’s work helps to raise the cost of fraud, making
these kinds of attacks economically unattractive to cyber criminals.”
At the core of the RSA FraudAction service is RSA’s Anti-Fraud
Command Center (AFCC), an experienced team of more than 130 fraud
analysts who work 24x7x365 to shut down fraudulent web sites, deploy
countermeasures, and conduct extensive forensic work to help stop online
criminals and prevent future attacks. The AFCC has established a network
of dozens of ISPs and more than 13,000 hosting entities around the world
and provides multi-lingual translation support in nearly 200 languages
to further enhance its ability to detect, block and shut down sites on a
global scale.
“Every hour a phishing attack remains active can be costly for the
targeted organization such as a bank or online retailer,” said Avivah
Litan, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner. “Web fraud
detection and takedown services have proven to significantly help reduce
the lifespan of these attacks which helps minimize the potential of
financial loss for targeted organizations and to reduce the distribution
and potency of the malware that is typically used in these attacks to
infect end users and harvest information such as log-in credentials and
other sensitive data.”
The RSA FraudAction Research Lab recently estimated
(http://www.rsa.com/experience/consumer/infographic/RSA_Phishing_Infographic.html)
that worldwide losses incurred from phishing attacks during the 12-month
period of the second half 2010 through the first half 2011 reached
nearly US$1 billion with more than one-third of those losses coming from
organizations located in the U.S. and U.K.
“Our services have become increasingly valuable to our customers
given the continued evolution and rise of phishing attacks that
fraudsters are making more sophisticated and harder to detect,” said
Michal Blumenstyk-Braverman, General Manager of RSA Israel. “Our team
of online fraud fighters works alongside customers to help reduce
exposure to phishing, pharming and Trojan attacks that seek to
compromise customer data that can lead to financial loss. The AFCC is
among the world’s best at this, evidenced by how quickly we have been
able to identify and disable attacks before they can cause widespread
damage.”
The RSA FraudAction service is the recipient of numerous awards and
industry recognition from leading analyst firms
(http://www.rsa.com/press_release.aspx?id=11406) and independent
publications. In addition to providing anti-fraud services, the RSA
Anti-Fraud Command Center issues a Monthly Online Fraud Report
(http://www.rsa.com/go/gpage.aspx?id=163) that provides news and
analysis on phishing trends such as top countries attacked, most used
attacked vectors, and other data from the Center’s global phishing
repository.
The RSA Anti-Fraud Command Center
(http://www.rsa.com/fraud/video/RSAisrael119___(508x286).wmv) serves its
global customers from two facilities within EMC’s Centers of
Excellence located in Herzeliya, Israel and Cork, Ireland. More
information can be found at the RSA Online Fraud Resource Center
(http://rsa.com/node.aspx?id=1331).
**estimates based on RSA Anti-Fraud Command Center calculations
combined with other third-party sources.
About RSA
RSA, The Security Division of EMC, is the premier provider of security,
risk and compliance management solutions for business acceleration. RSA
helps the world’s leading organizations solve their most complex and
sensitive security challenges. These challenges include managing
organizational risk, safeguarding mobile access and collaboration,
proving compliance, and securing virtual and cloud environments.
Combining business-critical controls in identity assurance, encryption
& key management, SIEM, Data Loss Prevention, Continuous Network
Monitoring, and Fraud Protection with industry leading eGRC capabilities
and robust consulting services, RSA brings visibility and trust to
millions of user identities, the transactions that they perform and the
data that is generated. For more information, please visit www.RSA.com
and www.EMC.com.
About EMC
EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service
providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service.
Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through
innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud
computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze
their most valuable asset – information – in a more agile, trusted
and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at
www.EMC.com.
EMC Canada (www.EMC2.ca), headquartered in Toronto with nine offices
from coast to coast, is a wholly owned subsidiary of EMC Corporation.
- 30 -
For more information contact:
Mike Martin/Michelle Chang
StrategicAmpersand
416-961-5595
mike@stratamp.com
michelle@stratamp.com