During my recent trip to Russia, I noticed that there is little concern about phishing. Most Russian IT executives are not aware that many phishing attacks originate in Russia and many sites are hosted there as well. Yesterday there was a great article in the Financial Times entitled: Security matters: The almost perfect bank heist (click here for the Russian version of the article). Some highlights:

• In 2006 a Russian group of hackers managed to get away with $150 million by launching as many as three simultaneous phishing attacks per week.
• In August of 2006 they hit two British banks. Accoring to BlackSpider Technologies, they set up a botnet with 20,000 computers in order to send 8.1 million phishing emails within 24 hours.