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Online Scammers Go Spear-Phishing

Posted by Zonk on from the fishing-with-a-'ph' dept.

Ant wrote to mention an examination at C|NET looking into the increasingly more effective techniques employed by phishers. From the article: "More recently, however, a hybrid form of phishing, dubbed "spear-phishing," has emerged and raised alarms among the digital world's watchdogs. Spear-phishing is a distilled and potentially more potent version of phishing. That's because those behind the schemes bait their hooks for specific victims instead of casting a broad, ill-defined net across cyberspace hoping to catch throngs of unknown victims."

5 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Re:bullshit article by Sir+Runcible+Spoon · · Score: 4, Informative

    There is more than one way to format a disk. If you do it with FDISK and don't provide the /MBR option it does not recreate the master boot record. If your virus is hiding there it will survive.

  2. WTF? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    When you install the OS, the MBR is overwritten.
    Memory resident ones? If he reformatted then he reinstalled the OS and if he reinstalled he rebooted and if he rebooted.... you figure it out.

    GP is correct, the story makes no sense.

  3. Dupe? by MirrororriM · · Score: 2, Informative

    Hate to beat a dead horse, but here is an older Slashdot story about "spear phishing" here ...

    --
    Content Management System: A pretentious way of saying "text editor."
  4. Wow Mods, pay attention at all? by OverlordQ · · Score: 2, Informative
    A) Not only does your link not work
    B) The man only left 358,000 Euros, not 5 million.

    The man, described by detectives as the greatest conman they had encountered, convinced one bank manager to leave him 358,000 in the lavatories of a Parisian bar.
    --
    Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
  5. Re:the path! Re:This is weird. by Prog_Burner · · Score: 2, Informative

    Most webmail will give the actual originating IP, not just the server IP, so it can be localized. So your e-mail, although sent from a server in the Cayman Islands, should still show an originator in the US. Even taking into account that you may have used a proxy in the Cayman Islands, it's less likely that it would be for the same company that provides the webmail. This is the path of the e-mail that we're talking about, it can still be deemed suspicious by software, especially if there's some sort of history (we are talking about e-mail that appears to be from someone you know and have a relationship with.) Most users wouldn't know what any of this means though, they'll still open an e-mail from unknown sources after how many years of being informed of the danger, so it seems to be more of a matter of education than one of protection.