Internet Users Advised to be Cautious of Bogus E-banking Sites

CyberSecurity Malaysia's Cyber999 Help Centre has recently released an advisory according to which phishing attacks are increasing both in number and speed, as reported by BERNAMA on December 19, 2009.

Reminding the public to remain wary of bogus websites, the advisory tells them that these sites actually carry out phishing attacks by pretending to be trustworthy entities like authorized banking websites.

Lt. Col. Husin Jazri, Chief Executive Officer of CyberSecurity Malaysia, said that the Cyber999 Help Centre had been getting a number of complaints from Internet users in Malaysia about phishing websites hosted by overseas service providers. Those sites accurately resembled a few of the widely-used regional banks' online banking sites, Jazri said, as reported by Mysinchew on December 22, 2009.

Fraudsters use the phishing sites/bogus websites to launch phishing assaults through the manipulation of humans' inadequate IT security. The websites pretend to be a trusted source like an imitation of a known e-banking site.

Jazri further said that the phishers used social engineering techniques in their attacks, like dispatching spam mails, which appeared to be sent from reputed local banks.

Commenting on the issue, the Internet security analysts stated that the phishing or fraudulent e-mail tried to convince users into following a web-link, which led to the bogus e-banking site for the purposes of phishing.

Jazri said that since the bogus e-banking site appeared just like the actual Internet site, consumers were tricked into entering their personal confidential information such as usernames and passwords into the phony site.

The method thus enabled the phishers to easily steal sensitive information of unwitting accountholders of different banks.

But, according to Jazri, banks wouldn't ever request users to send their updated account details, reset passwords, unlock accounts, or do anything else with respect to banking operations through e-mails or web-links.

Hence, the Centre suggested people to wholly overlook e-mails came to them looking same as messages from a financial institution like a bank.

Moreover, security analysts suggested people getting such spam mails to get in touch with their banks to verify the e-mails' authenticity, or contact Cyber999 Help Centre.

Related article: Internet Threat Volumes Overwhelm Security Companies

» SPAMfighter News - 1/5/2010