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Posted by Monty Solomon on April 16, 2008, 1:46 pm
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Larger Prey Are Targets of Phishing
By JOHN MARKOFF
The New York Times
April 16, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO - An e-mail scam aimed squarely at the nation's top
executives is raising new alarms about the ease with which people and
companies can be deceived by online criminals.
Thousands of high-ranking executives across the country have been
receiving e-mail messages this week that appear to be official
subpoenas from the United States District Court in San Diego. Each
message includes the executive's name, company and phone number, and
commands the recipient to appear before a grand jury in a civil case.
A link embedded in the message purports to offer a copy of the entire
subpoena. But a recipient who tries to view the document unwittingly
downloads and installs software that secretly records keystrokes and
sends the data to a remote computer over the Internet. This lets the
criminals capture passwords and other personal or corporate
information.
Another piece of the software allows the computer to be controlled
remotely. According to researchers who have analyzed the downloaded
file, less than 40 percent of commercial antivirus programs were able
to recognize and intercept the attack.
The tactic of aiming at the rich and powerful with an online scam is
referred to by computer security experts as whaling. The term is a
play on phishing, an approach that usually involves tricking e-mail
users - in this case the big fish - into divulging personal
information like credit card numbers. Phishing attacks that are
directed at a particular person, rather than blasted out to millions,
are also known as spear phishing.
The latest campaign has been widespread enough that two California
federal courts and the administrative office of the United States
Courts posted warnings about the fake messages on their Web sites.
Federal officials said they stopped counting after getting hundreds
of phone calls from corporations about the messages. At midday on
Tuesday, one antispam company, MX Logic, said in a Web posting that
its service was still seeing at least 30 of the messages an hour.
Security researchers at several firms indicated they believed there
had been at least several thousand victims of the attack whose
computers had been compromised.
...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/technology/16whale.html?ex=1365998400&en=208591045a06cdff&ei=5090
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