As some of you may have noticed, Wednesday night the #Rock phishing group decided to explore new geographical horizons by targeting a French bank. We have been following the guys from this group, which is probably why it made me shiver when I discovered they are back in the scope - this time unfortunately going after one of my clients. (We detected and stroke back on their last attack 4 months ago, when the Rock'ers targeted the US-based retail branch of a European bank).
For the ones who have never heard of #rock, this cybercriminal group constitutes of a dozen of cronies with solid long-term experience in the phishing business, creative minds, polymorphic technical skills and strong personal bonds – all the ingredients to make a stable and efficient group. We estimate that #rock generates between 30 and 50% of all phishing websites launched in 2006. #Rock emails represent about 0.1%+ of the total 20 billion daily email traffic circulating on the web. So they send about *20 million* emails a day. No more, no less.
The #rock’ers often inaugurate new rogue techniques, such as for instance the RSA token MitM attack, and possess what may be considered the most advanced of the existing industrial-level infrastructures for multi-target phishing attacks. The most annoying part when dealing with #rock phishing schemes is that they use multiple phishing pages' kits, and can literally create *hundreds* of new domains and name servers *every single day* to host their fraudulent content.
Up until recently, #rock mostly targetted Nordea, BB&T, FithThird, NAB and Sparkasse banks. Yesterday, they integrated to their wishlist a small branch of a French bank, in the Cantal region. The question is how the hack did some guys in Moscow find out there was some "cheesy" business to run over there?

(Cantal is also the name of a famous cheese produced in this region)

Since the first attack of the Cantal branch, we have discovered about 30 new mirrors of the phishing website that we are to be taken down beore the fraudsters launch a new phishing spam compaign. The current phishing campaign advances at the pace of approximately 2 new phishing websites *per hour*. It takes a mere mouse click for the #rock’ers to register new domains, set new DNS servers and change hosting location for their phishing farmstead 
Hopefully, when you're stuck in a middle of long-standing war, there's some times reasons to laugh and relax a bit.
For example, one of the DNS server used is z1.fernieflyfishing.info
Less funny was the reply I got last night after sending a takedown notice to one of the operators in Turkey:
abuse@ttnet.net.tr on 3/1/2007 23:12
The message could not be delivered because the recipient's mailbox is full.
Turkish operators seem to be badly unprepared to deal with phishing...