Phishers move beyond eBay, PayPal
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EBay and PayPal, once the primary lures used by phishers to trick e-mail users into giving up personal information, aren&#39;t as popular as they used to be.According to security vendor Sophos, which monitors&#160;spam and phishing&#160;e-mails to catch new blasts and determine trends, the number of messages pretending to be from eBay or its payment subsidiary PayPal has dropped from 85 percent of all phishing e-mails a year ago to 21 percent in September.&quot;That&#39;s an impressive turnaround by anyone&#39;s standards,&quot; said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, in a prepared statement.Cluley attributes this drop in part to&#160;online initiatives&#160;by eBay and PayPal to educate their customers about phishing scams, and to PayPal&#39;s launch earlier this year of an&#160;authentication keyfob&#160;that creates a dynamic password for customers concerned with fraud.Sophos says the amount of phishing attacks circulating have stayed relatively consistent over the past year, but now phishers are using different tactics to try and fool recipients. Phishers are beginning to diversify by spoofing small credit unions, other online retailers, and overseas companies, he says.Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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Do-it-yourself phishing kits are being made available for download free of charge from the internet, security watchers have warned.
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Phishers targeted 154 different brands in July, a 20 percent increase from June and 12 percent higher than the previous record, the Anti-Phishing Working Group said Monday. The overall number of phishing sites increased to 14,191, also a new record.
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Apparently it&#39;s not just unwary individuals that fall victim to online scammers. Even large corporations, it seems, can get suckered into parting with their money by devious&#160;phishers.Case in point: Eden Prairie, MN.-based grocery chain Supervalu, which earlier this year got conned into depositing more than $10 million into two fraudulent bank accounts before recognizing the ruse. Details of the case are contained in court documents filed in connection with two forfeiture cases stemming from the incident.According to federal court filings in the U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho, the fraudulent activity took place in late February and early March this year. In the court filings, Stephen Kilgroff, Supervalu&#39;s vice president of legal affairs, said that on February 26 and 28 the company received two separate e-mails, one purporting to be from an employee at American Greetings Corp. and the second from an employee at Frito-Lay, both company-approved vendors.Both e-mails told Supervalu to send future payments for each vendor to new bank account numbers. In the case of the e-mail that purported to be from American Greetings Corp., Supervalu was advised to send payments to an HSBC account in Miami. The other e-mail advised Supervalu to send Frito-Lay payments to an account at First Security Bank in Rogers, Arkansas.Between Feb 28 and March 3, Supervalu deposited just over $6.5 million via multiple wire-transfers to the HSBC account, thinking that it was sending the money to American Greetings Corp. Similarly, on March 2 it made eight separate wire-transfers to the bank in Arkansas, depositing a total of $3.6 million to an account it thought belonged to Frito-Lay.In addition to the $6.5 million deposited by Supervalu into the HSBC account, an additional amount of $500,000 had been deposited into the same account by a second company, identified as &quot;ROHM&quot; on court documents. No information has been available concerning the second company, and it is not a party to subsequent litigation.Around March 6, according to the filings made by Kilgroff, Supervalu discovered that it had been &quot;induced&quot; into making the transfers to the bogus accounts. Following the discovery of the fraud, Supervalu quickly notified the appropriate law enforcement authorities, who managed to recover nearly all of the money before it could be withdrawn from the accounts.The recovered money is now being claimed by Frito-Lay, American Greetings and Supervalu. In making the claim to the recovered money, Frito-Lay said that it believes the money belongs to Supervalu and said supported that company&#39;s claim to ownership of the misdirected funds.&quot;However to the extent there is any determination that the ownership of these funds changed from Albertsons/Supervalu [the Albertsons grocery chain was recently acquired by Supervalu] to Frito-Lay (as a result of the attempted transfer, the misdirection, or any other development) Frito-Lay makes this claim to these funds in the alternative and subject to any claim of ownership by Albertsons/Supervalu&quot; the company said in an affidavit.A federal judge is expected to rule sometime in November on which firm should receive the recovered funds.A spokeswoman from Supervalu responded via e-mail to a request for comment. &quot;As indicated by the forfeiture complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney&#39;s Office in Boise, Supervalu was the target of attempted financial fraud,&quot; spokeswoman Haley Meyer said. &quot;Due to our internal controls and processes, we were able to quickly discover and report this to the FBI. As a result of the quick work of the Boise FBI Office and the U.S. Attorney, any funds lost are minimal.&quot;Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.&#160;
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Phishing scams increased by more than 100% in October causing banks, financial services firms and popular consumer websites until grief.
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New threat: Phishing attempts that ask the victim to call their bank to reactivate a credit card, then provide a false phone number.
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Online payment service  PayPal is offering its users antifraud and antispam tools from security vendor Cloudmark.
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Fraudsters are achieving higher levels of automation for phishing scams, using software tools and botnets to increase the reach of their work, according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group.
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You know all about phishing scams, right? You know better than to click on a Web link embedded in an e-mail that purports to be from your bank, or to reply to messages requesting your user name and password. But if you think that's enough to protect yourself, think again.
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Some websites are now offering surfers the chance to download free &quot;phishing kits&quot; containing all the graphics, web code and text required to construct the kind of bogus sites used in internet phishing scams.
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Several Internet companies, including Microsoft and eBay, are working on new ways to keep spammers from infiltrating their sites.
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There's a new kind of theft growing in popularity -- be careful!
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The online cons known as &quot;phishing&quot; have cost US consumers $500 million, according to a study released Wednesday. In addition, the study found that three-quarters of wired Americans have noticed an increase
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Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY), and  Visa International have banded together in an attempt to combat phishing attacks.
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Persistence pays off A week or more after it was brought to its attention, eBay has plugged a hole in its sign-on page that was being exploited by phishers.â¦
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'Tis the season for online scams, spam, and malware attacks. Here's what you need to know.
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Scammers are using fake electronic greetings to lure recipients to malicious sites.