Phishers Begin Taking Aim at Local Credit Unions

Security investigators at AppRiver the security company caution that cyber-criminals recently have gotten more focused by attacking local credit unions in phishing assaults.

Accordingly in one such case, AppRiver says the phishers aim at the Grow Financial Credit Union of Tampa Bay.

Notably, Tampa Bay is an estuary and a big harbor that's naturally made off Florida's coast along the Gulf of Mexico.

States AppRiver that the assault starts with an electronic mail purporting to be from the Grow Financial Credit Union, issuing a security alert to consumers that someone may've hacked into their accounts. The e-mail also displays an attachment supposedly one PDF file named GrowFinancialFCU_Account_Restore_Form.pdf.zip, which consists of an Html web-page that attempts at seizing the Grow Financial account details of the e-mail readers.

Remarking about this phishing attack, Troy Gill a researcher at AppRiver posted online that because the majority of people were extremely careful about following web-links within e-mails, therefore, phishers in the current instance thought that by presenting a web-page in its entirety they could make the message appear more legitimate. Indeed, the scam was so well-crafted that it simply indicated that consumers of smaller banks weren't more secured from such assaults in relation to what others were from the same, Gill analyzed. Appriver.com published this during the 2nd week of March 2011.

Eventually, the above mentioned fraud appears to establish one fresh standard for phishing scams as well as suggests that online crooks are gradually changing their normal techniques in favor of other new tricks. Conventionally, phishers have attacked big institutions of finance so they could have as many numbers of probable preys as possible. The reason being, phishing assaults are normally low in their success rates. Hence, logically it can be said that it's better to have less from plenty compared to having less from what's not plentiful. But human behavior isn't always associated with things that are straight forward, as people generally regard those e-mails with suspicion that come from more or less little known institutions compared to those that frequently-attacked organizations may send. This same situation has occurred in the current phishing scam.

Related article: Phishers Expand Their Sphere of Attacks

» SPAMfighter News - 3/23/2011