Devious New Breed Of Phishing Goes For The Big Dogs
Scary and hilarious stuff in the news this morning.
Hackers have developed a new e-mail scam sent to the nations top executives. The message tells them they've been subpoenaed. Once the subpoena is clicked, the hackers are then able to remotely control the computer, record keystrokes and much, much more.
This software isn't piddly bubbles, either. Less than 40% of commercial anti-virus software was able to detect and destroy it (the article doesn't reveal which ones do, but I'd suggest beefing up your system if you're making six digits).
Focused attacks such as these are called whaling, instead of phishing, as the targets are heavy-hitters, suits and people with one or more assistants carting lattes around and sweating Microsoft Excel data.
And while I could never condone this kind of behavior, I do find it ironically hilarious that hackers are using subpoenas as hooks. That's one thing contemporary execs will definitely read!
Larger Prey Are Targets of Phishing [NYT]
NeonMadman
Posted to In the News on 16 April 2008
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: hacking, phishing, whaling
3D iPhone glasses. Why?
It is kind of a whaling attack targeting big fishes in corporate offices like CEO’s, top executives and managers.
“This is one of the best phish e-mails I've seen in the past 6 years” quoted by Mr. Steve Kirsch, a well known Silicon Valley entrepreneur
Remember, that it is not legal to send subpoena via emails unless it is agreed by the people. Also All US Federal courts have URLs of the form “courtname.uscourts.gov” and not in the form
“uscourts.com” mentioned in email. So Beware of these kinds of mails. The Abaca Email Protection Gateway (http://www.abaca.com/) service was the only service I know that quarantined these emails.