Spammers have clearly found fertile ground in Phishing for identity theft among financial web site users. In a new twist, they’re now after your Vonage VOIP account username and passwords too.
We’re seeing more and more emails spoofing various Vonage customer service email addresses such as:
From:
- service@vonage.com
- Vonage LLC.<noreply@vonage.com>
- Vonage LLC. <serv@online.vng.com>
- Vonage LLC.<no-reply@onlinevonage.com>
- Vonage <auto-dbdb@accounts-vng.com>
- Vonage <auto-dbdb@accounts-vng.com>
With most of these emails using a simple Subject line of:
Subject: Customer Notice
A screen shot of such a fraudulent email:
- Click for Larger Image
The contents of the email are cleverly simple, stating only:
Dear Vonage Customer,
Your online account has been locked due to unusual activity.
Please login here to unlock your account, and continue using vonage services.
In reality, the “login here” hyperlink takes you to a variety of identity stealing sites that appear to be Vonage login pages, but in fact are used to steal the username and password of those who provide their credentials to these thieves.
A clever tactic used by this campaign is the linking to a Vonage logo that’s hosted by a CNet website, rather than embedding or attaching it to the email itself:
http://news.cnet.com/i/bto/20070925/vonage_logo.bmp
The advantages to the spammer are many:
- Spam filters won’t match against the actual spam hosting site
- Filtering may be more likely to allow the email based on the inclusion of the “cnet.com” URL
- The message will not be penalized for embedding or attaching the logo within the email
- Linking to the image keeps the size of the email as small as possible, allowing for faster transmission, which can matter to spammers trying to deliver their payloads before filtering systems update and adjust.
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