The new Phishing Detection Module will be used by banks and other financial services institutions to detect and prevent malicious attempts to defraud customers using online banking services.

The Aungate Phishing Detection Module detects phishing attempts by monitoring text, picture and broadcast content, automatically understanding the content and cross-referencing a range of Internet sources in order to alert the enterprise in real-time of fraudulent attempts to extort money. Aungate's existing spam solution has proven its ability to deal with the problem of spam effectively; the new module adds automatic phishing detection to this core feature set.

Phishing is increasingly used to prey on vulnerable computer users who use online banking facilities and extort their money. These scams come in a variety of forms and are evolving regularly, such as e-mails that provide a link to a fraudulent sites, inviting the recipient to enter personal details. It also poses a serious risk to large financial institutions by seriously compromising the credibility of their security precautions.

According to Butler Group, the incidence of phishing attacks has grown by 4,000% since last year. Due to collaboration between hackers and organised crime attacks are becoming much more sophisticated. This means it has become far more difficult for everyday computer users to distinguish between the Web site of their own bank, and something that has been put together by a phishing attacker.

Ian Black, Managing Director of Aungate said "The phishing problem is serious. These attacks strike against the credibility of on-line trading as a whole - users of electronic banking and trading systems need to be certain their personal and financial details cannot be compromised in this way. It is important for us all to be able to understand what actions can and are being taken to counteract the phishing threat. Aungate has automated the process of threat detection to enable spoof web sites to be removed quickly before users are duped into revealing personal financial details which may lead to substantial losses."

The Phishing Detection Module builds on Aungate's core technology - the Autonomy Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) - which enables organizations to monitor a wide range of digital sources in real-time and form an understanding of their content in order to alert genuine enterprise to potentially devastating phishing attacks.