Anstis said the solution relies on government supporting ISPs to implement content filtering and to force users to install malware protection.

Websense Australia-New Zealand Country Manager and member of the Anti-Phising Working Group (APWG), Joel Camissar, said a national spam filtering program would end spam.

"Spam would be all but eradicated if ISPs banded together to filter incoming mail, since there are only about eight or nine pipes connecting local ISPs to the rest of the world," Camissar said, recognizing that this carries a host of privacy issues.

"Spammers are using social engineering in their phishing attacks and it is working."

Still, the bulk (75 percent) of phishing e-mails are targeting eBay and its payment subsidiary Paypal users according to research conducted by Sophos LLC last year.