Fraudsters stayed a step ahead of gullible Internet users in 2005 by fine-tuning their tactics and turning to more sophisticated strategies, a U.K.-based Web monitoring firm said in December 2005. Open redirects were one of favorite tactics of phishers in 2005, said Web tracking and anti-phishing company Netcraft, and a good example of fraudsters’ increasing proficiency. Redirects, essentially scripts on the Web server, are used by legitimate domains to redirect users to other parts of a large site from, for instance, the home page. Phishers can sometimes exploit these scripts to send users to a fraudulent site when users click on a link in a real site. Netcraft pointed to several examples of redirection attacks in 2005, including one that used an incorrectly configured government site to fool users into giving up Social Security and credit card numbers.