After years of being able to con millions of email users into handing over the bank account logins via fake requests to "login to your account and confirm, your password" it seems that more of us have woken up to the idea that not everything you get off the internet is true and good. Phishing Drops; Are Scammers Switching Tactics?

Internet criminals might be rethinking a favorite scam for stealing people's personal information.

A report being released Wednesday by IBM Relevant Products/Services Corp. shows a big drop in the volume of "phishing" e-mails, in which fraud artists send what looks like a legitimate message from a bank or some other company. If the recipients click on a link in a phishing e-mail, they land on a rogue Web site that captures their passwords, account numbers or any other information they might enter.

IBM's midyear security report found that phishing accounted for just 0.1 percent of all spam in the first six months of this year. In the same period in 2008, phishing made up 0.2 percent to 0.8 percent of all spam.

It's not clear what, if anything, the decline means. (It also doesn't appear to be a statistical illusion caused by an increase in other kinds of spam. IBM said overall spam volume hasn't expanded, like it did in years past.)

Kris Lamb, director of the X-Force research team in IBM's Internet Security Systems division, which did the report believes phishing might have fallen off because computer users are getting smarter about identifying phony Web sites. Security software is also getting better at filtering out phishing sites before Web surfers ever seen them.

It could also be that criminals are moving on from phishing to another kind of attack, involving malicious software. IBM said it is seeing more instances of "Trojan horse" programs, which are used to spy on victims.

[...] To protect yourself against phishing, access sensitive sites on your own, rather than by following links in e-mails, which might lead to phishing sites.

Learning some healthy scepticism is also good. Believe it or not, the chances that you have been "selected" to help transfer $100 million in illegal funds from Nigeria fall slightly lower than being hit twice, by lightning, in the same place, on the same day, eating the same ice cream.

If you haven't figured that out, can you please tell me how you got all that money in the first place?

Stories of triumph over scammers, or woe at the gullibility of 'relatives" or "friends" in the comments please.

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