Brussels, 22/06/2016 (Agence Europe) - After passing through the Netherlands and Luxembourg, the organisers of the European Union Anti-phishing Initiative (EU-PI) were in Brussels on Wednesday 22 June. This platform seeks to step up the fight against phishing activities.
It was launched in August 2014, following a European Commission call for project proposals. The EU-PI project helps to directly collect the Internet addresses used by the public for phishing, in an effort to swiftly block them on browsers. According to Vincent Hinderer, the project coordinator, 90,000 URL addresses flagged up corresponded to phishing attempts.
Although cybercrime often has a virtual resonance and the victims do not always feel concerned by these attacks, the dangers are, nevertheless, very real. Eric Freyssinet, the Co-president of Signal-Spam.fr, informed EUROPE that this involved "quite simple fraud focusing on the basic technique of identity theft", which had financial and psychological ramifications for the victims, business and the banks that can lose "several billions of Europe a year", he added.
In an effort to make the fight against these criminal practices as efficient as possible, Europe has a role to play. In this connection Mr Freyssinet explained that this project "needed support from the European authorities in either a research and development perspective or in the area of partnership developments with the police". At a legislative level, he said that all member states should "move forward at the same speed and introduce measures that help prevent infringements". The platform coordinator concluded that if a sustainable economic model is found with private partnerships, the ultimate objective would be to "pursue the initiative and extend it throughout the European Union". (Original version in French by Maëlle Didion)