Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 21 August 2007 17:33
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 4
The first series of attacks appear to come from relatively legitimate sounding organizations, with a notification thanking you for having signed up to their website or service, listing your temporary account number, username and password, and giving you a link to sign in.
It’s here that they want you to change your login information to what they hope will be the usual username and password you use with most sites, while also loading malware onto your computer to recruit it into a botnet.
Once again, in a warning sign, the link comprises of a numerical web address, not an address with words, although if you’ve been distracted with the thought of ‘Which site did I join? Let me go and have a look’ – and bang, you’ve clicked the link, and are potentially already downloading malware onto your computer.
One of the new phishing emails thanks you for having joined ‘Wine Lovers’ and has the subject line ‘New User Letter’, while another purports to be from the ‘Funny-Files’ jokes website with the subject line ‘Tech Department’.
There’s one from ‘Free Web Tools’ with the subject line ‘New Member Confirmation’ and the last one we’ve seen has a second joke site making an appearance in an email from ‘Joke-A-Day’ with the subject line ‘Member Registration’ or ‘Dated Confirmation’.
As these emails only seem to have started appearing in the last 36 hours, we can expect many more permutations of relatively legitimate subject lines and the companies and websites they are supposedly coming from.
Outlook 2007 identified these messages as potentially being phishing attack emails through a red warning bar, and rendered links unclickable unless you specifically click the red warning and then choose to enable the links, giving even the most impulsive plenty of opportunity to think twice or even thrice before proceeding.
But these mails weren’t caught by Outlook 2007’s spam filter, and might not be being caught yet by your spam or phishing filter either.
Those using other email programs will experience different results in having messages flagged as spam or phishing attacks, which is why it’s always important to be on your guard when reading email.
The “bad guys” keep on spamming us all with emails containing various payload attacks that have slowly become cleverer and cleverer as time goes on – they’ve even seemed to have learned how to spell properly – at least in the last few such emails that I’ve seen.
So, what's the second email attack, and how is it exploiting the current sharemarket financial crisis? And what do I need to do to protect myself, my data and my computer from today's sophisticated threats? Please read onto page 3 for more...
