Highly Targeted Phishing From Salesforce.com Leak

An anonymous reader writes "Salesforce.com has finally acknowledged what security experts have suspected for weeks: that a Salesforce.com employee had his company credentials stolen in a phishing scam, and criminals have been using names and e-mail addresses from Salesforce's customer list to conduct other highly targeted phishing attacks, including the recent round of fake e-mails apparently from the Federal Trade Commission." In such hightly targeted attacks, the AV companies are at a loss — they have little chance of quickly developing signatures for threats that only reach a few thousand victims.

Comments

ummm... what?

[Anonymous Coward]

In such hightly targeted attacks, the AV companies are at a loss -- they have little chance of quickly developing signatures for threats that only reach a few thousand victims. In other news, the auto-safety companies are at a loss with respect to fire safety violations in people's homes - they have little chance of quickly developing airbags for threats like leaving a cigarette burning and unattended.

Seriously, what do AV companies have to do with phishing scams? The proper counter-attack to phishing is user education, and proper security practices at various sites (e.g. banking sites not using email for official correspondence, not allowing info to leak, etc.). There are some technological tools that can help reduce the impact of phishing (e.g. toolbars that notify the user of suspicious activities) but ultimately this is an issue of user education...

...and I really have trouble understanding why AV companies should be the ones to come up with 'signatures' to detect this stuff...

AV companies appropriate?

[morgan_greywolf]

Are AV companies even the appropriate resource for dealing with phishing scams? Why don't we just teach people some common sense or something? Phishing is a user education problem, not a problem to be attacked by antivirus tools.