PhishLabs Intercepted Emails Scam Which are Targeting Executives

Businessnewsdaily.com reported on 14th May, 2014 quoting PhishLabs, a cybercrime protection firm which discovered the scam email initially, as "A new malicious email is targeting high-end executives of medium and large companies asking for payment of outstanding invoices and executives who end up paying are actually sending money direct into the pockets of cyber crooks".

The latest scam tries to convince victims to wire money to various accounts managed by the cyber crooks masterminding the scam as these scammers are very tricky and take all necessary measures to give their scam a genuine look.

Businessnewsdaily.com published news on 14th May, 2014 quoting an explanation by Don Jackson, Director of Threat Intelligence of PhishLabs, as "One of the causes the new email is very dangerous because the scammers are not mailing spoofed invoices which can be recognized as fakes".

In fact, the scammers are relying on the reality that accounts departments of the targeted organizations will have real due invoices from the firms being spoofed.

The email often includes a fake "original message" in attempting to set the pretext that some targeted recipient from the same organization has had previous conversation with the impersonated sender about a wire transfer.

The fraudsters used the actual domain name of the impersonated sender in the faked message entitled similar domain name. The fake message is also back-dated as if the supposed email conversation was already many days old.

The first sample of PhishLabs was received by an executive of a large media company which was monitored and found that many targeted organizations are large or mid-sized retail companies with a high volume of invoicing activity between large numbers of resellers/distributors.

Analysis suggests that the link between targeted organization and the spoofed senders might have happened from details on professional networking websites.

Itsecuritynews.info published another statement on 14th May, 2014 quoting Jackson as saying "We know more about the criminal operations but cannot share these details. The scope of criminal operations and findings show an overall impact which calls for investigation by law enforcement agency".

» SPAMfighter News - 5/23/2014