While phishing attacks have been plaguing the clients of financial services firms for some time, a new type of attack is causing concern, according to IT security experts.

There has been a marked increase in pharming attacks. Unlike phishing, pharming attacks hide in a network connected computer and harvest financial details of the user’s regular web destinations, according to Fortinet. However, once the pharming attack is launched, attacks can be directed at a large number of sites that the user may visit on a regular basis.

While many are still coming to grips with phishing - and several banks have rolled out two factor authentication in a bid to secure their clients’ home PCs - there are fears that pharming could wreak greater havoc. According to research firm Gartner, phishing - which uses fake email and websites to lure victims into disclosing financial information - accounted for $3.1 billion in fraud in 2004.

However, as with phishing, experts said a mix of technology and education is the key. “Combining human engineering approaches with the proliferation of advanced virus code, the growing sophistication of malicious e-crimes is too much for many popular internet security solutions,” said Adam Stein of Fortinet.

Meanwhile, Fortinet also reported that while virus prevalence decreased throughout May, there were several worrying signs that bot activity is on the increase. Bots are infected computers that can deploy a large number of asymmetric threats at the same time.

May also saw the first political mass mailer virus. ‘Sober.P’ was designed to attack at the same time as ticket sales for the FIFA football world cup 2006 began and adapted its message language to target domains. While it was short lived, it caused a lot of damage.