Phishing Campaign Strikes First International and Discount Bank Clients

A new phishing campaign that was triggered on September 16, 2009 reportedly targeted clients of First International Bank of Israel and Israel Discount Bank. Numerous customers got phishing e-mails crafted in English, which told them that they must provide their updated passwords for Internet services of the banks.

Actually, the text of e-mails made some customers suspicious, so they reported about them to the banks.

Discussing the situation after the attack, a spokeswoman of Discount Bank said that they were speaking of only 20 Discount Bank clients who got the scam e-mail and notified the bank about the issue. According to her, the bank's IT security instantly swung into action to disable the phishing website and accomplished the task in a couple of hours. She also added that there was no harm caused to either the accounts of the clients or the bank's website, and activities continued as usual.

She further said that it was vital that concerned parties were alerted of defrauding attempts occurred through phishing ventures. Since they (defraud attempts) are all same, the bank is advising its customers that they should not reply to any queries and not reveal personal details like passwords or those regarding their accounts to strangers.

Furthermore, First International Bank too states that it never requests its customers for their private information through e-mail. The bank cautioned that if clients typed in personal identification particulars on the phishing website, they could be instantly misused for unauthorized financial dealings on the bank's actual site.

Hence, authorities at the banks and security specialists recommended that people shouldn't dispatch personal information electronically, and particularly not respond to e-mail requests, which the customer hadn't initiated. They further advised netizens to access the bank's website for logging into personal accounts by manually typing in the URL into their browser's address bar instead of accessing it via an e-mail link.

Although phishing has long become a common practice globally, scammers have now begun to attack even small countries like Israel. During 2008, Bank Leumi was also a target of a phishing scam that sought consumers' confidential information.

Related article: Phishing With A Redirector Code

» SPAMfighter News - 10/8/2009