Phishing Education Scheme Started Following Growth In Phishing Threats

Recently APWG (Anti phishing Working Group) declared that it jointly with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is working to reduce the destruction caused from freshly targeted phishing scams. These scams, which employ both offline and online tricks, aim to extract bank account numbers, their matching passwords, and SSNs so that businesses and individuals can be defrauded off massive amounts of dollars in merchandise and assets every month.

The newly-launched effort follows an observation by the IRS, government agencies and other well-known Internet shopping websites that a certain type of phishing scam is increasing in number. This scam often involves one uninvited e-mail with an attached questionnaire into which the recipient is supposed to furnish information, and then send it back through fax to the sender of the fake e-mail.

Actually, in the IRS phishing instances, an agency which phishers have targeted for years, it's more probable that recipients will reply and dispatch personal information. For, they won't take the risk of facing the penalties that though stressed inside the e-mails are wholly fictitious.

Of late, many consumers of IRS have been getting messages which appear to be from IRS.gov. They have an attachment which appears as a Word file, however, carries one PDF document that in reality is a malicious executable.

If the file is run, active trojans get installed that do a series of activities. First, they connect with a remote system and inform it about the host machine's infection, then they execute a malware that enable remote code to be executed, and finally they spam out e-mails from the infected computer.

Additionally, IRS and APWG state that these offline/online e-mail scams mean heavy costs to businesses and consumers. Thus, the mean cost from offline phishing campaigns varies between some thousands and many thousands of US dollars. Moreover, the victims don't even perceive that they've sustained the losses till the time the scammers have long finished the crime.

But now APWG has launched a program called 'Fax Back phishing Education Program' in which Fax-over-Internet-Protocol and telecom companies will get the necessary security details to instantly inform customers when they're struck with scams.

Related article: Phishing With A Redirector Code

» SPAMfighter News - 8/9/2010