A potentially costly phishing attack was thwarted after hackers targeted a number of e-mail addresses in Bermuda in an attempt to steal customer account information, The Royal Gazette can reveal.

The unsolicited emails were sent out yesterday morning, but were detected and subsequently blocked by most systems, it was confirmed by Paul Coleman, vice-president of marketing at Logic Communications.

Mr. Coleman said that Logic had a number of safeguards in place to stop and mitigate phishing attacks and updated its website yesterday morning with information about the attack and provided customers with details to contact the company in the event of such an incident.

He said that Logic's network security was automatically able to block the majority of the e-mails from being delivered, thus significantly reducing the number of people exposed to the phishing attack.

Additionally, Logic immediately blocked access to the hacker's website and worked with the other Internet Service Providers (ISPs) on the Island to ensure they too could shut off access to the site, further reducing the number of people affected by the attack, said Mr. Coleman.

He added that Logic was contacting all of people possibly exposed to the phishing attack to further secure their account if necessary.

"Phishing is actually very common, but the frequency it is done in is a very obvious way, so security systems at various points in the network detected it and just blocked it," said Mr. Coleman.

"For the majority of our customers, it was actually blocked for them and the few customers that it had got through to had turned off their spam filters."

Jamie Thain, managing director of FKB Transact said the company was alerted yesterday morning that residents were receiving spam email phishing for Logic account information and subsequently added filters to its exsting e-mail filters to block the information.

"Some of our customers did receive e-mail asking them to update their Logic account, which of course they deleted or ignored because they didn't have Logic accounts," he said.

"For Transact customers we will never send an e-mail asking you to log-on and change your account information.

"People should always call any bank, Government, company, Internet Service Provider, or anyone that asks you to update your personal information."

North Rock Communications did not respond when contacted by the paper about the phishing attack.