Phishing Scam Aims at Netflix Customers

Investigators at Trend Micro the security company are urging consumers of Netflix towards maintaining their guard against a phishing scam, which's presently going on, hitting their inboxes.

Netflix, notably, popularly offers movie streaming as well as rental facilities within USA.

Describing the fraudulent electronic mails, the Trend Micro investigators say that the messages, while displaying the caption "Your (user) Account Has Been Suspended," state that Netflix is dispatching the e-mail for informing the recipient that the date-of-expiry of his credit card is over and that he must go to his account and make his account information up-to-date.

Fascinatingly, there are two stages in which the phishing scam operates. As per the first, the account credentials of Netflix users are stolen when an advertised web-link leads them onto a fake Netflix login page.

And just when victims enter personal credentials, they're diverted onto another web-page that produces a form where they're prompted to enter their financial details, including credit card particulars.

The researchers at Trend Micro emphasize that phishers in the new scam have resorted to one original e-mail template of Netflix to make their messages appear authentic. Thus, the e-mails carry the company's color scheme, logo, contact details, and disclaimer.

Meanwhile, since the phishing scam is pretty malicious, security specialists advise users to follow certain valuable tips. 1st, they shouldn't ever reply to e-mails, which ask for personal financial details, rather they must treat them with suspicion before deleting them completely.

2ndly, in case an e-mail user feels he must view the message, in that situation, he mustn't follow any embedded web-link. Rather he should manually enter the website's address straight into his Web-browser. Also, users wanting to anyway follow a web-link must pause and ponder again prior to clicking.

Additionally, they should deploy anti-spam filters since with them phishing e-mails can be blocked from entering inboxes.

Ultimately, it's because of the above kind of events that phishing e-mails have surged during 2010. In fact, the recently-released MessageLabs Intelligence Annual Report by Symantec a security company states that over 95bn phishing e-mails have been calculated as being dispatched during 2010.

Related article: Phishing With A Redirector Code

» SPAMfighter News - 12/31/2010