Phishing Lessons
Sunday, March 10th, 2013
A lot of spam and Phishing campaigns rely upon tricking the recipient into thinking they’ve received a billing error, from an otherwise legitimate source. The latest of these claim to be from ATT Wireless, and arrive with realistic sending addresses and subject lines, such as:
Subject: Your AT&T wireless bill is ready to view
From: “AT&T Customer Care” <icare7@amcustomercare.att-mail.com>
In reality, the sending addresses are spoofed, and these are instead sent by previously infected computers and hijacked servers, but that fact is not readily apparent to the typical email user.
What makes these types of emails so convincing is that the spammers are doing a much better job than they used to in terms of making these faked billing emails appear legitimate, such as this example we’ve seen a lot of lately:
more »
Tags: email, fraud, phishing, scam, spam, spoofing
Posted in Phishing Lessons, Spam Tactics | Comments Off
Monday, March 4th, 2013
We fondly remember the days when PayPal Phishing frauds were easily spotted by their subject line alone. The urgent warnings about your compromised account made identity theft emails almost trivial to identify.
But, as with all things technology, the lame Phishing attempts too have evolved, and they’re snaring even users with moderate technology skills. The latest evolution of the PayPal identity theft fraud relies on the user’s reaction to what appears to be a standard account notice. The subject line is a receipt for payment, but to a seller with which you have not conducted a valid transaction, such as:
Subject: Receipt for your PayPal payment to Soo Duk Lee
The email itself contains standard language like:
You sent a payment of $149.49 USD to Soo Duk Lee (commercializesa8@datkin.net)
Thanks for using PayPal. To see all the transaction details, log in to your PayPal account.
and
It may take a few moments for this transaction to appear in your account.
Here’s a complete copy of such a fraud:
more »
Tags: email, fraud, phishing, scam, spam, spoofing
Posted in All About Email, Email Fraud, Phishing Lessons, Spam Tactics | Comments Off
Thursday, February 21st, 2013
With the fake Better Business Bureau Trojan Horse campaign, we find yet another infectious email that is socially engineered so well, that users often release such messages from quarantine; even after spam filtering has clearly identified the emails as a Virus carrying Trojan Horse.
The emails typically arrive with spoofed headers such as:
Subject: FW: Complaint Case 091921
From: “Better Business Bureau” <Kerri_Rucker@newyork.bbb.org>
In order to appear legitimate and to try and evade simple spam filtering systems, the Complaint Case number will be randomized, and the spoofed sending email address will vary as well.
The content will include vague yet serious sounding allegations, such as:
The Better Business Bureau has received the above-referenced complaint from one of your customers regarding their dealings with you. The details of the consumer’s concern are included on the reverse. Please review this matter and advise us of your position.
A full copy of such the bogus email:
more »
Tags: botnet, fraud, phishing, spoofing, virus, zombie
Posted in Email Fraud, Phishing Lessons, Spam Tactics | Comments Off
Sunday, January 20th, 2013
For the thirteenth consecutive evaluation, OnlyMyEmail has again blocked more spam than any other filtering system in the Virus Bulletin VBSpam Challenge and secured yet another first place finish.
The latest competition ran for 16 consecutive days, during which, OnlyMyEmail’s MX-Defender accurately filtered out more spam than all other competitors tested, again missing just 1 single spam email out of 92,166 total. This represents a spam capture rate of 99.9989%.
By comparison, the next best capture rate was Libra Esva which missed 44 emails in total. The third best blocking rate went to Zerospam which missed 61 spam emails from the same corpus. The worst performers, missing well over 500 spam emails included: IBM, Sophos, SPAMfighter, Vamsoft, Spamhaus ZEN+DBL and SURBL.
more »
Tags: anti-virus, botnet, email, fraud, malware, phishing, scam, spam, Virus Bulletin VBSpam Competition, zombie
Posted in All About Email, Message Control, Phishing Lessons, Spam News, Spam-Stats | Comments Off
Monday, January 14th, 2013
Sometimes spam, viruses and Trojan Horse emails are so convincing that they manage to trick users even after spam filtering has clearly identified the emails for their true nature.
The recent spate in bogus “Your order is awaiting verification!” emails claiming to be from Staples office supplies is a pretty good example.
Despite being clearly marked as viruses, we’ve seen many users attempt to resend these blocked messages to themselves, apparently believing that our blocking these messages represents a false-positive result on the part of our filtering, whereas the opposite is the case.
The emails typically arrive with spoofed headers such as:
Subject: Your order is awaiting verification!
From: ”Staples Advantage Orders” <Order@staplesadvantage.com>
more »
Tags: botnet, fraud, malware, spam, spoofing, virus
Posted in Phishing Lessons, Spam Tactics | 1 Comment »
Sunday, November 18th, 2012
One of the most effective tactics in use by spammers today is the hijacking/theft of legitimate user’s email accounts for use in furthering spam campaigns.
There are actually four distinct reasons why it is so powerful for spammers to be able to send spam from a previously legitimate user’s email account:
- Once the account is stolen, the spammer’s software can read through the address book, inbox, sent mail and all other folders scraping the email addresses of people the legitimate user has corresponded with in the past. These emails then make excellent targets for sending spam.
- Email from actual AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and other ubiquitous email services are much less likely to be blocked by spam filtering systems.
- Even when a spam filter correctly recognizes that an email is spam, end users often have added such senders to their Allow or White lists, thus forcing delivery from the now compromised account.
- Further, recipients commonly retrieve spam from their filtering system when they recognize the sending address, but don’t realize the sender’s account has been compromised.
When you add it all up, there really is no better method of getting your spam delivered, and then actually opened by the target recipient.
more »
Tags: fraud, phishing, scam, spoofing
Posted in Email Fraud, Phishing Lessons, Spam Tactics | Comments Off
Tuesday, May 29th, 2012
The latest abuse of Google Docs for email theft appears in your inbox as:
Subject: Mailbox Closure Warning!!!
or
Subject: WEBMAIL ADMIN.ntc
If that manages to grab your attention, the content of the message goes further:
Helpdesk requires you to upgrade webmail by Clicking
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGkzVVg4WGlMaWFpaGdYcG1wVlV4cVE6MQ
This Message is From Helpdesk. Due to our latest IP Security upgrades we have reason to believe that your webmail account was accessed by a third party. Protecting the security of your webmail account is our primary concern, we have limited access to sensitive webmail account features. Failure to revalidate, your e-mail will be blocked in 24 hours.
Thank you for your cooperation.
more »
Tags: fraud, phishing, spam, spoofing
Posted in Email Fraud, Phishing Lessons, Spam Tactics | Comments Off
Sunday, May 13th, 2012
The latest bank Phishing Fraud emails to make the rounds via email are targeting HSBC Bank customers and clients.
The emails typically arrive shouting out warnings in all capital letters:
Subject: ACCOUNT VALIDATION REQUIRED!
And greet you as their “Dear Esteemed HSBC customer,”
Strong wording explains that you need to take immediate action to protect your account. An example of such a message:
Your Account Validation did not work properly. We are experiencing difficulties in updating your account from our maintainance servers as some information are either out of date or missing from our systems.
To this end, we are contacting you to please validate your account information with us.
To begin log on to internet banking on https://www.hsbc.ae/1/2/InternetBanking/?SecureLogin with your internet Banking credentials and validate your account with us as soon as possible.
This Email is subject to mandatory action. Failure to comply will lead to suspension of account activities with HSBC. HSBC will bear no responsibility of any mishaps caused if no action is taken.
more »
Tags: fraud, phishing, spoofing
Posted in Email Fraud, Phishing Lessons, Spam Tactics | Comments Off
Friday, May 4th, 2012
In the never-ending quest to steal identities, there seems to be no limit to the sites that spammers and cyber-criminals will try to impersonate.
Many web users are now understandably suspicious of emails claiming to come from Ebay, Paypal or their bank. And, we’ve already seen email frauds claiming to come from Netflix, Vonage, Linked-in and of course Facebook.
Now your cellular service emails can no longer be trusted either…..
An email Phishing fraud campaign is actively making the rounds with emails falsely claiming to come from Verizon such as:
Subject: Your Bill Is Now Available
more »
Tags: fraud, phishing, scam, spam, spoofing
Posted in Phishing Lessons, Spam Tactics | Comments Off
Thursday, January 19th, 2012
Here’s something we really don’t see every day….
We recently received an email claiming to be from the U.S Department of Justice Victim Notification System (VNS)
Subject: US Department of Justice Victim Notification System
From: Courtney Walker <fedemail@vns.usdoj.gov>
To: Business Representative <address>
Our typical “common sense” check for email Phishing Fraud starts with the obvious:
- Overly serious/threatening Subject line…. check!
- Human sender doesn’t match email address…. check!
- Impersonal and generic salutation… check!
The email itself open with:
DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL.
U.S. Department of Justice
Federal Bureau of Investigation
FBI – New York
26 Federal Plaza, 23rd Floor
New York, NY 10278
Phone: (212) 384-2564
Fax: (212) 384-4104
more »
Tags: botnet, DOJ, FBI, fraud, Government, humor, phishing, Privacy, scam, Security, spam, spoofing
Posted in Above The Law, Email Fraud, Message Control, Phishing Lessons | Comments Off
