Thursday May 25, 2006
Gone phishing?
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For anyone using internet regularly, “phishing” attacks are simply a nuissance, an annoying plague.
No one really believes any more in urgent missiles from his bank demanding confirmation of personal details but removal of these electronic pieces of human deception becomes a tiring routine.
Business or private users may receive daily up to five emails written to appear as if they have been sent by banks or other reputable organisations, with the intent of luring the recipient into revealing sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, credit card details etc.
Typically, phishing attacks will direct the recipient to a web page designed to mimic a target organisation's own visual identity and to harvest the user's personal information, often leaving the victim unaware of the attack.
But the increase in sophistication of cyber attacks was underlined recently in ominous sign of days to come when three Florida banks have had identity-theft attacks, another name for phishing, launched from their own websites
"Attackers were able to hack servers run by the ISP that hosted three small banks' websites, reported Techworld. They then redirected traffic from the legitimate Web sites to a bogus server, designed to resemble the banking sites, according to Bob Breeden, special agent supervisor with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's computer crime centre.![]()
Users were then asked to enter credit card numbers, PINs and other types of sensitive information, he said.
"The bad guys have created a way to take away the safety of typing the address of your bank," said Breeden. "We have to address it now and say to people, 'Even if you do go to your online bank's website, you need to be very careful.'"...
"Instead of clicking on a bogus web link in an e-mail, the attack hit users who had entered the correct URL for the banks in question. According to Breeden, the affected banks are Premier Bank, Wakulla Bank, and Capital City Bank, all small regional banks based in Florida."
For advice on how to fight e-robbers back go here but it is rather lamentable; or if you want to report the "spoofing" try security news, but bearing in mind that these attacks never last very long it would only be beneficial to public at large. Afraid, we all will learn from your misfortunes.
Posted in: Net by bubblejam at 03:42 PM | Comments (0) | Email This Entry
