Spam uses John Howard heart attack as phishing bait

Angus Kidman
Monday, 19 February 2007 10:47

Your IT - Home IT

Having seemingly exhausted the possibilities of sending phishing mails which use headlines stolen from the news, scammers have now come up with a new tactic: headlines that didn't even happen. Their first target: John Howard, who is claimed to be recovering from a heart attack in a new message now doing the rounds.

"The Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard have survived a heart attack," the message ungrammatically claims, before adding that "the best surgeons of Australia are struggling for his life". The entirely fake message, dated February 18, also includes a large chunk of incomplete text apparently lifted from an online biography of Howard.

The phishing scam attempts to redirect visitors to a site which claims to be for the newspaper The Australian, but which was actually registered in Canada on February 14 this year. Contact emails for the site consist of a series of nonsense characters,

News-driven tactics have become increasingly common, as phishers seek to convince users that their messages are valid. Recent examples have included the US Superbowl and storms in Europe as topics. Many phishing mails direct users to sites which install trojan software which can take over their PCs and be used to form botnets for the further sending of spam.