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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."

4 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. 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."
  3. 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.
  4. 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.