Phishing Scam Hits Gmail Chat

A new phishing scam has invaded Gmail as it uses the IM (instant messaging) service or Gmail chat to trick innocent users into revealing their passwords.

To begin with, cyber criminals break into Gmail chats and compromise the chat accounts. Subsequently, they distribute bulk messages to the addresses of other users with a link supposedly connecting to a 'hilarious video'.

However, when users receiving the messages click on the link, they land up on a website named 'ViddyHo' that asks for their Gmail usernames and passwords. Using that information, the website then compromises more accounts to send messages to more users, and this goes on and on; thus, increasing the number of victims.

Daniel Carroll, Reporter for the site of Harvard Crimson newspaper, states that he has found from his investigations that a man named Hoan Ton-That from San Francisco seems to be behind the phishing fraud, as reported by ReadWriteWeb on February 24, 2009.

Meanwhile, a prominent security blogger, Nathan Burke, also revealed information about the ViddyHo site. He said that when he checked up the details of the site's domain, he discovered that the site was functioning throughout the 3rd week of February 2009, as reported NETWORKWORLD on February 24, 2009.

Mr. Burke further reported that Viddyho.com was targeting a number of other chat services such as MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, MySpace and ICQ.

Meanwhile, Google informs that it has locked the addresses from where the messages are being sent. The company also disclosed that various browsers like Apple's Safari, Firefox and Google's Chrome was showing an alert when surfers try to access ViddyHo.com. The site thus is now considered a phishing website.

Security specialists said that even many tech-savvy users got ensnared into the scam. Reportedly, the earliest victims of the fraud were students of the Harvard University (US).

Although investigation into the scam is on, Google suggests that users who might have entered their login details on the phony site must reset their Gmail password as a security precaution.

Related article: Phishing With A Redirector Code

» SPAMfighter News - 3/9/2009