RSA Shuts Down More Than 500,000 Cyber Attacks Across 185 Countries

BEDFORD, Mass., Dec. 6, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- 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(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.

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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.

"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, 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% 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 2011 alone, the RSA FraudAction service saved our customers an estimated $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 that worldwide losses incurred from phishing attacks during the 12-month period of the second half 2010 through the first half 2011 reached nearly $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 and independent publications. In addition to providing anti-fraud services, the RSA Anti-Fraud Command Center issues a Monthly Online Fraud Report 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 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.

**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.

EMC, RSA and FraudAction are either registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other products and/or services are trademarks of their respective owners.

SOURCE EMC Corporation