E-mail Scams Spoofing Reputed Brands

E-mail security firms and consumers keep on fighting against e-mail scams since the latest ones exploit Internet users' trust on reputed brands. Mimicking the appearance of such brands, these fresh scams raise the possibility of recipients replying to them.

During the 2nd week of June 2010, Red Condor spotted a spam attack that spoofed YouTube, as reported by RedCondor on June 16, 2010.

In the particular spam attack, users via a web-link were diverted to a hijacked Canadian Pharmacy website. As end-users followed the web-link, they started to download and run a Trojan horse, which tried to steal passwords, banking credentials and other confidential login details.

In this attack, users only need to click once and the malware gets downloaded. Normally, the advanced malware attacks need a minimum of two clicks - one on the malicious e-mail link and another on the fake website that downloads a malicious code.

Meanwhile, the new attack with a single-exploit click generates a far greater rate of success. When users actually click only once, there is no time for retreat when they become conscious that they have stepped into the danger area.

Commenting on the problem, Dr. Tom Steding, CEO of Red Condor, who's also co-author of 'Built on Trust' stated that the modern attacks were more sophisticated where the objective was to grab corporate and personal data using any method, as reported by MarketWire on June 28, 2010.

Notably, it is not difficult to identify scams as they are poorly designed and have many grammatical errors and misspellings. However, the modern phishing and spam mail attacks are extremely advanced so that even skilled PC operators become prey to these types of scams.

Additionally, impersonating the e-mail IDs of trustworthy organizations' executives or other staff members can lead to increasingly dangerous outcomes like breach of social faith.

Red Condor, earlier, too had stopped and cautioned people of spear phishing, ordinary phishing and attacks with blended threats that impersonated popular brands like Adobe, Amazon, eBay, YouTube, Craigslist, BlueMountain eCards, Apple, Twitter and Facebook.

Related article: E-Crime Reporting Format To Be Launched in July

» SPAMfighter News - 7/7/2010