'Phishing' drops; are scammers switching tactics?

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Internet criminals might be rethinking a favorite scam for stealing people's personal information.

A report being released Wednesday by IBM Corp. shows a big drop in the volume of "phishing" e-mails. That's when fraud artists send what looks like a legitimate message from a bank or some other company.

IBM's midyear security report found 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.

It's not clear what the decline means. IBM says it could be that computer users are getting smarter about identifying phony Web sites. It also could be that criminals are moving on from phishing to another kind of attack.