Phishers Capitalize on Apple’s Shutdown of its Developer Center Domain

Internet-fraudsters are running one fresh bout of phishing electronic mails to coincide with Apple's Developer Center online site outage, published macrumors.com dated July 25, 2013.

It maybe noted that Apple's developer website provides online forums, documentations and software downloads that intermediate software makers can use.

The fraudulent electronic mail capitalizing on the currently going downtime of Apple's Developer Center addresses the recipient as "Dear Apple Customer," and tells that he can regain his Apple account by validating his A/C details. For that he merely has to click a given web-link so that one safe browser window opens up. After validating that the account belongs to him, he needs to abide by the instructions, the e-mail states.

The web-link, which follows the message body, is named "Update Now."

The latest efforts, nevertheless, appear less persuasive compared to earlier phishing attempts, as punctuation and grammar are very poor. The most conspicuous error is the spelling of Apple without an "A" within the electronic mail's text.

However, phishing scams aiming at Apple customers aren't any rare happenings considering the huge client-base the company carries. Moreover, since there can be numerous casual end-users possibly just hazily aware about the recent outage at Apple, they could currently get increasingly chanced with becoming victimized with the phishing assault, security specialists remark.

Reportedly, it was during the 3rd-week of July 2013 that the Apple problem began. It occurred when Apple dispatched a notification telling all authorized software makers with Apple that somebody attempted at accessing the developer site for stealing personal data.

Apple software makers were told about a possible hack. According to the notification, there had been encryption of sensitive personal data that couldn't therefore be accessed. It added that even then, Apple couldn't dismiss the probability of certain developers' names, e-mail ids and postal addresses getting accessed.

For dealing with the problem, it became necessary for Apple to shutdown the website as also entirely revamp its developer systems, instantly.

Now Apple cautions its developers that incase they get an e-mail asking to reset their passwords, they must be extremely cautious while ensure the authenticity of the message before proceeding to act.

» SPAMfighter News - 8/1/2013