Where have all the phishers gone? Gone to graveyard everyone?

A new report released by IBM Corp on Wednesday showed that the volume of phishing emails has decreased significantly over the recent months. IBM midyear security report revealed 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.

Security experts are not sure about what this decline in phishing may mean. It cannot be explained as a decline at the expense of other spam increase. IBM said overall spam volume hasn't expanded, like it did in years past.

"That is a huge, precipitous decline in the amount of phishing," said Kris Lamb, director of the X-Force research team in IBM's Internet Security Systems division, which did the report. But "I wouldn't tell anybody that phishing has died as a threat."

To Lamb’s opinion 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. But it also may mean that cyber crooks are just shifting from phishing to another kind of attack, involving malicious software.

Meantime, Dean Turner, director of Symantec Corp.'s global intelligence network, who didn’t participate in IBM’s research also noted that phishing volumes reduced but he warned that it could increase again later in the year. Phishing scams spike around the holidays, he said.