Medical Center Targeted By Dismissal Spam Attack

A smattering of workers at Decatur, Ga-.based Dekalb Medical Center, received messages stating they were being dismissed. The subject matter indicated "Urgent - job matter," and the correspondent named on the e-mail was at dekalb.org, the medical center's domain. The message carried the link to a site that alleged to provide career-counseling data.

It's obscure whether other institutions were aimed by the strike, which fed on employees' anxieties of job loss in their endeavor to bring them to reply to a message they'd possibly avoid.

Known as aimed junk e-mail or spear phishing, this kind of spam is presently growing. This is very annoying since the spammer can "assume " the e-mailing address to make it appear as if it has originated from inside the institution of the receiver, making it tough for spam screeners to trap.

Moreover, being different from usual spam that's conveyed in a bulk, spammers are transmitting just smatterings of such e-mails at one go, once more making it tough for anti-spam equipment to spot.

"We obstructed countless spam at our e-mail portal as the communicator's addresses aren't authorized, however these messages were," states Sharon Finney, Dekalb Medical Center's information security administrator. The Dekalb Medical Center has 3,500 staff on its roll.

Following detection of the fraud, which sneaked through the institution's modest filters, Dekalb's system administrators enforced regulations to stop internal entry to the phishing website advertised via the scam messages. A couple of computers at Dekalb were affected by an anonymous malware (Trojan keylogger) on account of the strike.

Over the past few years, the idea of "spear phishing" has acquired immense fame. Instead of phishing by transmitting emails claiming to be from organizations with numerous clients like eBay or Citibank, spear phishing is greatly aimed, and at times, more fraudulent. It is normally conveyed straight to persons at a particular establishment, appearing to have originated from somebody within the establishment and planned to participate in whatever the company does.

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» SPAMfighter News - 11/8/2006