Although the vendors behind those browser claim to be succesful in stopping the phishing attacks, this hasn't lead to a decrease in the amount of phishing emails, David Jevans, chairman of the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) chief executive for security firm IronKey said at a meeting with reporters in San Francisco.

Insted criminals have wised-up to blacklists by registering a new domain for each phishing run. The result, claims Jevans, is an explosion in the number of unique phishing domains recorded. Up from 11,976 a year ago to 37,438 last month, according to APWG records.

The long term solution, suggests Jevans, is for a new system to be established that would allow for both web sites and e-mails to be authenticated. Such a system, however, would require the cooperation of every major ISP, software vendor, and hosting service, a monumentally expensive undertaking that Jevans admits is not likely to happen any time soon.

"As we approach the midyear mark, we wanted to check on our crystal ball gazing skills," said Jeff Green, senior vice president of McAfee Avert Labs and product development. "As we predicted, professional and organized criminals continue to drive a lot of the malicious activity on the Net. However, we were surprised that mobile malware and image spam tapered off."

Password-stealing Web sites are on the rise

The number of phishing Web sites continues to rise exponentially. McAfee Avert Labs saw a 784 percent increase in phishing Web sites in the first quarter of 2007, with no slowdown in sight. These Web sites typically use fake sign-in pages for popular online services such as online auctions sites, online payment processors or online banking. Avert Labs anticipates increasing abuse of sites meant for online collaboration such as wiki pages and online applications. Even Internet archive sites will suffer.

Spam, particularly image spam, is on the rise

The total amount of spam caught in McAfee Avert Labs' traps has stayed fairly flat during the first part of the year. Image spam accounted for up to 65 percent of all spam at the beginning of 2007. It has actually dropped recently. Image spam is junk e-mail that includes an image instead of just text. It is used typically to advertise stocks, pharmaceuticals and degrees. The image can triple the size of a single message. This causes a significant increase in the bandwidth used by spam messages. In November 2006, image spam accounted for up to 40 percent of the total spam received. It was less than ten percent a year earlier.