E-mail Account of IUSB Dean Hacked

As per the news published by southbendtribune.com on June 14, 2010, the email account of Marvin Curtis, the Arts Dean of the Indiana University South Bend (IUSB) (South Bend, Indiana, US), was recently hacked by cybercriminals.

The hackers then used the Dean's account to send spam emails to dozens of University's current students, ex-students, the Dean himself and several others. The emails included links to two Viagra websites.

Curtis said that he noted the scam on the afternoon of June 12, 2010 for the first time and found that it had intruded his AOL home account, as per the news published by southbendtribune.com on June 14, 2010.

As soon as he learnt the scam, a notice was posted by him on his Facebook wall, warning friends that a virus had been discovered on his AOL account and that cybercriminals were dispatching fake e-mails from his e-mail ID.

Meanwhile, Curtis said that he had again installed virus protection on his PC (in case it had been infected by a virus) in a bid to resolve the problem.

This is just one of the numerous examples of spam emails that are daily relayed by cybercriminals to trap innocent users like Curtis, experts stated. Unfortunately, these sort of personalized attacks are rising day by day.

Cybercriminals seem to be outperforming law agencies as they are constantly failing to stop such criminals. One of the major reasons for this failure is that most of these spam emails originate from foreign land, which makes it extremely difficult to trace them. Nigeria and many other African nations, UK, Canada and Russia are the leading spam producers.

For instance, in Curtis's case, local police may identify the origin of the spam emails, but all in vain, as the department can't afford to travel abroad to nab the criminals who were actually sending the fake emails. They could only pass on the information to the concerned authorities in that jurisdiction from where the spam had originated.

So ultimately, it's the responsibility of netizens like Curtis to ensure their safety themselves by employing a reputed firm's Internet security software so that such incidents don't occur in the very first place.

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

» SPAMfighter News - 6/22/2010