Is Today April Fools Day?

Now that Corillian is merging with InteliData you can be assured that more banks will see their sales reps. They have also recently partnered with Quova to assist in a more comprehensive and integrated offering for anti-phishing solutions.

As banks continue to try and tackle the ID Theft and Phishing threats to operations, the technology is only a part of the puzzle.

The strategy for monitoring, detection and enforcement must be mult-faceted and involve a combination of technologies. More importantly, you must do as Microsoft has done to find out who is behind these crimes. Let's assume you have very deep pockets.

Microsoft has filed 117 civil lawsuits against alleged phishers trying to scam Microsoft customers out of personal information such as credit card numbers.

The lawsuits, filed in Washington, identify large-scale scam operations and seek damages from so-called phishing operations. Phishers typically send out spam e-mail, made to look like official e-mail from a real e-commerce company, asking recipients to click on a link and update their personal information. The link takes consumers to a website that mimics the look of the real company, but collects personal information for ID thieves to use.

The new lawsuits - Microsoft has previously gone after two other phishing schemes - target unnamed defendants who sent spam e-mail and put up websites targeting Microsoft services such as MSN and Hotmail.

Through them, Microsoft will issue subpoenas and attempt to uncover the names of the people behind them, as well as identify support operations such as Web hosting services and mass e-mail services, said Microsoft lawyer Aaron Kornblum.

Is today April Fools Day? Forget about Phishing. It's time to worry about Pharming.