E-mail Notice Supposedly from Apple Result in Phishing Website

A crafty fraudulent phishing electronic mail is doing the rounds, attempting at deceiving recipients into divulging personal Apple password and username for seeing one supposed update associated with the users' iTunes accounts, published Mnsbc.com dated October 31, 2011.

Apparently, the scam electronic mail arrives from do_not_reply@itunes.com while it's dispatched via smtp.com. Captioned "Account Info Change," the e-mail accurately copies the majority of visual aspects related to the actual transaction.

Spoofed e-mails, imitating the above kind of notice, are presently targeting people's mailboxes and, unfortunately appear very convincing. The standard appearance of "clean" Apple remains identical, with the text also being the same as that of an actual Apple notice

E-mail recipients are likely to follow the given web-link, which pretend to log into their Apple ID, while it's disguised to appear genuine. And if clicked, they are likely to find themselves getting led onto one Internet site, which attempts at duplicating the original Apple website, with the exception that the former contains advertisements on the page's bottom.

Thereafter, the page requests the consumer for supplying a username and password that are then dispatched to the perpetrators of the entire episode.

Security researchers state that fraud with iTunes isn't unnatural as cyber-criminals realize the ease with which they can phish victims off their credentials that can subsequently help in making fraudulently orchestrated purchases of Apple products.

Moreover, this form of phishing assault doesn't require too much storage space since it merely saves users' Apple credentials. Thus it can be just a spam mail; however, the result doesn't vary from the standard information capturing malicious programs, which seek for loading themselves onto target computers.

The mentioned operations can prove extremely perilous for users' credit balances since they enable cyber crooks to gain admission into the users' Apple accounts that have plentiful sensitive information like address, credit card number as well as telephone numbers.

Conclusively, Trend Micro's researchers advise Internet users to always remain vigilant about the slightest intricacies within suspicious looking e-mails. Also, they must check again the provided URLs; erase all unsolicited e-mails; and remember that cyber-crime can have endless possibilities.

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

» SPAMfighter News - 11/7/2011